


Mysterious Mermaid Island

by Stark_Raving_Madlad



Category: Original Work
Genre: Egg Laying, F/F, F/M, Harems, Male to Female TG, Mermaid Sex, Mermaids, Mermen, Merpeople, Multi, Nipple Play, Orgasm Denial, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Weird Biology, female only species, human to mermaid TF, human to merman TF, kinky mermaid sex, kissing cousins, merfolk, merfolk can't feel anything below the waist, mermaid problem, mermaids can't have sex, mermaids don't have a hoo-hahs, mermen are rare to nonexistent, mermen don't have junk, sexually frustrated merpeople
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:13:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 37,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26273164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stark_Raving_Madlad/pseuds/Stark_Raving_Madlad
Summary: Josh and Alex are sent on a magical vacation by their wizard relative.  They didn't expect to get turned into a merman and a mermaid.  They really didn't expect how frustratingly horny it would make them to be all fish below the waist.  Then they meet all the other mermaids, trapped for centuries on and around Mermaid Island...
Relationships: Human/Mermaid - Relationship, Merman/Mermaid - Relationship, mermaid/mermaid
Comments: 5
Kudos: 26





	1. Chapter 1

Josh knew that his Uncle Jack liked to kid around. But he’d never really believed that his uncle could in fact be a real, live wizard.

It was the summer after his junior year at college; Josh had just turned twenty-one, and he was looking forward to a _real_ vacation. Parties, girls, and legal booze—he was eager to visit the bars and especially the dance clubs. He was honestly surprised that his parents had suggested that he spend the summer with his cousin Alex and his Uncle Jack, where he would be in another city and largely free of their… _supervision_ wasn’t the right word, not at his age. Parental _interference_ , perhaps?

Whatever. It was shaping up to be one hell of a summer.

Uncle Jack ran a curio shop full of eclectic oddities, weird antiques, and exotic foreign imports. He lived alone with his only son, Alex, in the same building, in a spacious condo above the shop. Whenever Josh had come to stay with his uncle in the past, he and Alex had always gotten up to all kinds of childish mischief. Alex was the clever sort, a people-person, and just conniving and reckless enough to get them both _into_ trouble; whereas Josh was quieter, more cautious, and prone to having what he called “vibes”—gut feelings that warned him of danger or discovery, just in time to get them both back _out_ of trouble again.

After retrieving his suitcase and using his phone to tip his Uber-driver, Josh made his way from the sidewalk into the curio-shop. The little bell chimed overhead as he pushed his way in through the front door, into a large room packed close with cluttered knickknacks and oddities. The place appeared to be deserted. “Hello?” he called out. “Uncle Jack!? Alex?”

No answer. That was unusual for the middle of the day: at least one of them should have been minding the shop, right?

Josh heard a muffled “THUMP” from overhead and decided that they both must have been upstairs in the condo. Hefting his suitcase, he located the stairs and went on up.

* * *

He found Uncle Jack in his study—a room that Josh had only rarely ever glanced into during previous visits. It was piled high with musty old books and (believe it or not) actual scrolls of parchment and vellum. Uncle Jack was a middle-aged man, broad-shouldered and tall, with a pleasant, round face, salt-and-pepper hair, and a shaggy beard. At the moment, he was wearing a flowing robe and a pointy hat, both blue and covered in silver moons and stars; and he was chalking some kind of arcane design onto his study’s hardwood floor.

“Hey, Uncle Jack,” said Josh in a casual tone. “What’s with the Halloween wizard getup?”

Without looking up from his work, Uncle Jack rolled his eyes and said, “How many times do I have to tell you, kiddo, it’s not a ‘getup’. I’m a real, actual, honest-to-the-gods wizard. A—”

“I know, I know,” cut in Josh. “A ‘twelfth level arch-magus of the Hermetic Order of the Silver Dusk’.” He’d heard this song-and-dance plenty of times before.

“Actually, it’s thirteenth now,” said Uncle Jack with pride.

Just then, Alex came into the room. “Hey, Dad, do you think I should—oh! Hey, Josh, I didn’t hear you come in!” The two cousins shared a quick embrace—more of a back-patting “bro-hug”, really—before breaking apart again. Despite being related and roughly the same age, Alex and Josh were a study in contrasts. Where Josh had dark hair and eyes, a deep voice, and a fit physique that he maintained through countless hours in the gym, Alex was blond-haired and blue-eyed, slender to the point of scrawny, usually had his nose buried in a book or three, and had a high-pitched, almost feminine voice. (In truth, Josh had long presumed that his cousin was gay or at least bi, but it had never really come up in a conversation before. He didn’t know; he didn’t particularly care; he simply didn’t feel that it was his place to pry.)

“Hey, Alex, good to see you!” said Josh. He cocked a thumb in Uncle Jack’s direction and asked, “Any idea what your dad is up to in here?”

Alex turned to his father and asked, “Does this have something to do with that big-time wizard’s conference that’s supposed to be in town all month?”

Uncle Jack finished up with his chalk—now there was a huge, circled hexagram on the study-floor, surrounded by all manner of occult sigils and runes—and set it aside. Then he faced one of his many bookshelves and ran a finger along the codices’ dusty spines. “As a matter of fact, yes it does,” he said, finally locating the tome that he was looking for and pulling it off the shelf. He blew the dust off the cover and explained, “I’m gong to be so busy all month long that I won’t have time to entertain you kids. So, I thought I might offer you something better. How would you boys like to take a proper vacation?”

“A vacation?” asked Josh. “What do you mean?”

“I mean a vacation,” said Uncle Jack as he opened the ancient tome and leafed through its yellowed pages. “Let’s see here… too dark; no… too dangerous there… that plane of existence usually mostly on fire… aha! This one’s perfect. A quiet little pocket-dimension, totally self-contained. Sun, sand, and sparkling beaches. How does that sound?”

Josh brightened. “Beaches? Now you’re taking!”

“Surf boards and bathing suits,” agreed Alex. “Oh yeah! Count me in!”

“We can get started right away,” said Uncle Jack. “All you boys have to do is stand in the middle of the conjuring-circle, right there. But I wouldn’t worry about surf boards _or_ swim trunks: you won’t need them where you’re going.”

“Uh… shouldn’t we at least bring _something_?” asked Josh. “Umbrellas and beach towels? Cooler full of cold ones?”

“Nah,” said Uncle Jack. “You’ll have everything you need right there. According to this old grimoire, it’s a perfect paradise!” With that, he pointed his hands at Josh and Alex and incanted in a deep and booming voice, “ _Potestatibus meis, vos ad Insulam Dercetis_ _MITTO!_ ” 

* * *

Being transported through space and time and into another dimension altogether was by far the most disconcerting thing that Josh had ever experienced. It felt like getting stretched out over miles and miles and then suddenly being snapped back together, like a living rubber band or a piece of used chewing gum. He felt very strange—kind of rubbery all over, and at the same time tingly, as if he were being prickled everywhere with pins and needles—when he finally started to come to. He noticed first thing that he was flat on his back, and he felt the sensation of warm sand on bare skin underneath him.

Josh tried to sit up, but he couldn’t. He tried to see, but his vision was still blurry. He could hear, though: he clearly heard the sounds of rolling surf and squawking seagulls. Was he actually on a beach, then? Had he actually been transported somewhere by real _magic_? Josh certainly hadn’t expected anything like that. He had only moved to stand on the hexagram alongside Alex to humor his kooky uncle.

Slowly, his sight and his ability to move came back to him. Again, he tried to sit up, and again, he found that he couldn’t. Josh found that he was able to move his arms just fine, but his waist and his legs didn’t respond to his mental commands at all. What was going on? Where was he? Where was Alex? And where had his clothes gone? Josh was pretty sure that he was naked now. His vision finally cleared at last, and he propped himself up on his elbows and looked down—only to freeze in shock and no small amount of horror.

As he’d suspected, he was indeed on a secluded beach somewhere. And as he’d guessed, he was indeed completely nude, every last scrap of his clothing having vanished during the transport between dimensions. But the only fact that really registered with Josh right now was the realization that he no longer had any legs. From the waist up, he looked the same as he ever had, his bare torso and arms as well-muscled as ever (gym-rat that he was); but from the waist down—the transition was downright abrupt, exactly at his waistline—he now sported a scaly blue fishtail and a huge rayed caudal fin. 

He had been transformed into a fucking _merman_.

Josh fell backwards onto the sand and rubbed his eyes several times before looking again. Nope; the tail was still there. He wasn’t dreaming. He could actually feel it moving now, feel the sensation of his scales on the sand, feel his fin as it flopped up and down like a fish out of water. He groaned in fear and confusion. Seriously, what was going on? What had Uncle Jack done to him? 

Josh propped himself up again, arms straight and locked at the elbows, and looked around. Now he was gazing out on a vast ocean-scape, with nothing on the horizon but foaming breakers and the occasional sandbar. He tried, with some difficulty, to twist his body and turn around; it wasn’t easy. That tail of his was pretty bulky and basically deadweight out of the water. The sight behind him was even more amazing: a huge cliff, really a rock-wall, rose up hundreds of feet above the beach. Josh could barely make out the green line of jungle at the top. He twisted again, gazing up and down the beach, but he couldn’t tell how far it went in either direction; so he didn’t know whether he was on an island now, or what. But he did spy a little alcove in the rock-wall not far away, where a waterfall spilled down from the foliage above and filled a crystal lagoon below. That certainly looked like a little slice of heaven, or something out of a fantasy.

It was just about then that Josh heard another small groan coming from not too far away, and he realized that he wasn’t alone on this beach. There was no sign of Alex or anybody else up on the sand with him, but… but wait. Out in the surf. There was someone down there in the shallows, halfway in the water and almost out of sight, with little rolling waves tossing foam over them and covering them with seaweed.

Josh awkwardly turned his body around—it wasn’t an unpleasant feeling, the sand on his scales, despite the beach’s sunbaked warmth—and tried to crawl. His upper body was plenty strong, but that tail of his was a thick column of solid muscle: it was _heavy_. On land, the best he could manage was a kind of comical seal-flop as he pulled himself down into the water with his arms. 

The waves felt absolutely amazing on his scales; he noticed then for the first time that while he had been out of the water, he hadn’t felt the least bit uncomfortable, not really. It wasn’t like he’d been drying out or anything, and he just felt normal, perfectly okay breathing air. The only real difficulty had involved moving his deadweight of a fishtail. But in the water? Everything felt _great_. The saltwater was soothing and cool on his tail and fins, and suddenly it was as if the lower half of his body had come alive. It could move freely now, and so could Josh. Even in this very shallow water, he was suddenly able to propel himself with his fins and thereby really get around.

He swam over to the seaweed-covered lump in the surf and pulled some of the green strands away. Underneath them, Josh was amazed to discover an unconscious _mermaid_. She was beautiful—incredibly so—with long, blonde, kind of wavy, classic mermaid hair; soft and graceful facial features, with full lips and high cheekbones and long eyelashes; and, _wow_ , what a body. Josh’s eyes drifted down as he pulled away the rest of the seaweed, gazing over her voluptuous hourglass figure; her perky and cantaloupe-sized tits that still somehow managed to look completely natural, no porn-star fakery in sight; her tight little tummy; and then an abrupt transition at the waist from tanned skin to orange scales, some five or six feet of sinuous fishtail, and finally a tropical yellow fin. 

A sudden, horrible thought came to Josh unbidden. Looking down at this absolute sea- _goddess_ , he should have been sporting the mother of all hard-ons right now; but even though he was certain that he was at least mildly aroused, it was definitely the case that down below his waist, he didn’t feel anything stirring at all. He ran a hesitant hand down the front of his own tail, experimentally probing at the smooth plane of scales on his front, where his groin used to be. There was nothing there; at least, not on the outside. On a whim, he reached back and felt for where his buttocks used to be; his backside was covered over in scales, not skin, just like everything else below his waistline, with no sign of butt-cheeks, an ass-crack, or any kind of opening.

The mermaid rolled over in the surf and groaned again. Josh gently picked up her head and said, “Hey. Hey there, Miss—wake up.” Then he poked a finger at her cheek.

The mermaid’s eyes snapped open, just in time for a breaker to spill over her face and fill her mouth with seawater. She started coughing, more from the surprise than anything else. And so Josh tried to help her crawl back up onto the beach with him. The pair managed to get back onto the dry sand easily enough, but once there, it was once again all bumbling and ungainly dragging of heavy tails, until they both collapsed onto the beach together.

“Oh. Oh, wow,” said the mermaid, rolling over and gazing down at her body in abject awe. Josh could tell that she was enthralled—that this was _new_ to her, just as much to her as it was to him. She ran her hands from her hips to her waist and then up to cup her impressive mammaries, and she looked over at Josh and said, “I’m… I’m a girl! Look at me, Josh, I’m finally a real girl!”

It took a few seconds for everything to click. Then, at last, recognition struck. “Alex!?” cried Josh.

“Who else would I be?”

“You—you—you’re a freaking _mermaid_!” Josh snorted a cynical laugh and added, “You’d think _that_ would be the part that gets your attention!”

“Meh,” said Alex with a shrug. “The weird stuff is kind of normal when your dad’s a wizard.”

“So…” Josh started, not really certain how to broach the topic. “So, you, uh, you’ve wanted this? To have a sex-change?”

“Yep,” said Alex with a nod, still feeling herself all over. “I’m trans. Always have been.”

“Okay… so, why not ask your wizard-dad to turn you into a girl? You probably could have done that years ago.”

Now Alex rolled over and propped herself up on one elbow, facing Josh. “Oh, I don’t know. Guess I was just kind of… scared to take that final step, maybe? Don’t get me wrong, though. I was eventually going to try and have Dad do it with magic. Way more effective than hormones and operations, know what I mean?”

Josh wasn’t sure what to say to that, and he certainly didn’t presume to judge Alex’s motivations regarding when or how or even whether she might transition all the way to female. But he knew that he loved his cousin (like a brother, he used to say, but he figured that he should probably start thinking “sister” now), and it would certainly never occur to him to think less of _anyone_ for something like this. He lifted up his own tail and looked down at the huge fin on the end of it. “I have to admit, this is pretty damn cool.”

“Yeah,” agreed Alex. Then she grinned and said, “Well, it looks like we’ve got ourselves a whole month here until Dad summons us back, so what do you want to do?”

Josh grinned back. “Well, we’re on a tropical beach, we’ve got all the time in the world, and this—” he pointed at his tail “—is like the world’s best-ever scuba gear. So why don’t we go for a swim?”  
  
Alex agreed. “Sounds like a plan, cuz! Last one in the water is a rotten egg!” She coiled her tail underneath herself and pushed off, and Josh did the same, and pretty soon the both of them were seal-flopping back into the surf, at least until the water became deep enough for the pair to wiggle their tails a bit and start to kind-of swim.  
  
While it was still shallow enough that her head was completely above water, Alex giggled and said to Josh, “This feels so weird. The sand is tickling my boobs!”  
  
“Gah,” Josh sputtered back, “you’re my cousin, don’t talk to me about your boobs!”  
  
Alex just giggled again and dove under the water with a flip of her tailfin. Josh followed her, and he was astonished to find that in addition to feeling pleasantly cool (not at all cold) and breathing comfortably, he could also see for quite a distance with perfect clarity. It was like one of those Discovery Channel documentaries with the underwater cameras: and the sight was _amazing_. The beach itself, even under the water, was little more than a barren, sandy slope with patterns of ridges formed by the ebb and flow of the tides, and a smattering of pebbles, shells, and the occasional starfish strewn about. But once Josh and Alex swam past the sand-bar and entered the deeper waters on the other side, they found reefs.  
  
Coral reefs! Wondrous sights of color and life: branching corals and brain corals, sea anemones and sponges. Shoals of pelagic fish, a pod of dolphins, some surprisingly playful basking-sharks and sting-rays, and even sea-turtles. Josh and Alex swam together for what seemed like hours, frolicking with the sea life, laughing, exploring. It was absolutely incredible, maybe the most amazing thing that Josh had ever seen in his entire life. He felt like he could probably do this for days on end and never get tired of it.  
  
But he did eventually notice that he was getting hungry, and when he said as much to Alex, she agreed. (Their voices sounded very strange under the water: muffled, and lower in pitch. But they could still talk, and they could hear each other just fine: both their vocal cords and their ears, Josh figured, must have become adapted to the water along with the rest of them.) “I wonder what mermaids eat?” Alex asked.  
  
“I don’t know,” Josh answered. “God, I wish Uncle Jack had given us just a little more time to get prepared for this stupid getaway of his.”  
  
“Well maybe he didn’t know,” said Alex. “Maybe that book of his never mentioned the whole ‘turn into a mermaid when you get here’ part.”  
  
“Oh, how would you know?” Josh grumbled sullenly. “Your dad is a nutty-ass wizard! For all we know, he could have known all along and just didn’t think of it—or he didn’t care!”  
  
“Oh, whatever!” scoffed Alex. Then, suddenly, she flicked her tail and darted off like a torpedo, and Josh only had a second to whirl around and realize that Alex was now hovering in the water behind him, holding onto a huge, struggling tuna-fish. “Come on!” she grunted. “Help me drag Charlie here back to the beach!”  
  
Josh could only shake his head. “Please do _not_ name the food.”

* * *

A very trying two hours later, Josh and Alex had discovered a few new things. One: merpeople were very good at catching fish. Two: unlike certain movies and TV shows that tried to be overly “realistic”, merpeople did not actually have scary teeth or claws that made them particularly good at _butchering_ fish. So, they had to make do with sharp pieces of coral and shell, to limited and varying degrees of success. Three: making a fire on a tropical beach was damned-near impossible when you couldn’t get very far inland to find dry brush or kindling to burn. Four: raw tuna didn’t taste that bad, at least not to the palate of a mermaid and a merman. In fact, it was pretty great.  
  
As the sun went down, Josh and Alex reclined on the beach together, finishing off the last of the tuna. Between the two of them, they ate the whole thing, and greedily. It was entirely possible that they had worked up quite an appetite with all of their activity that day; or maybe it was just that merfolk had powerful metabolisms. Josh didn’t know, but he certainly hoped that it wasn’t the latter, or else they’d be spending a large part of this vacation hunting for food.  
  
Josh looked up to the top of the cliff, where he could still see that line of jungle-trees. He figured that that area was totally inaccessible to merfolk, so they probably wouldn’t be having any coconuts anytime soon.  
  
He looked back at Alex, who was now combing her golden hair with a broken bit of coral. The fading sunlight glistened off her tail-scales, and the curve of her generous bust was accentuated by the deepening shadows. Not for the first time that day, Josh repressed a pang of guilt and regret. Alex was just so indescribably beautiful now, alluring like a siren of yore... for a moment, he was actually wryly thankful he couldn’t feel his genitals. (At least, he supposed that was the case. He hadn’t really looked hard enough to be sure what he had going on down there now, and as far as he could tell, the front of Alex’s tail was just as plain and featureless as his own. Honestly, he was kind of afraid to check and confirm or allay his fears. But for now, all he could really be sure of was the fact that if he were still human and ogling a mermaid this stunningly hot, he would definitely have a raging boner right now—and instead, below the waistline, he presently felt zip, zilch, nada, nothing at all.)

Anyway, thinking this way about his own cousin wasn’t something that Josh liked the notion of. He would rather that it not become a problem in the following weeks. So he started to wonder: were there other girls around here who could perhaps distract him, draw his attention? Other girls on this beach somewhere, or maybe (he could only hope) other mermaids out in the ocean nearby? He couldn’t say, but it was worth exploring.

“Hey, Alex,” said Josh as he stretched out on the beach and made himself comfortable. “What do you say we go looking for other people tomorrow?”  
  
“What, you mean like human-type people?”  
  
“Maybe. Or we can see if Uncle Jack sent us to a place with other merpeople to meet.”  
  
Alex too lay down and snuggled into the warm, tropical sand, placing her hands behind her head like a pillow. She looked up into the evening sky as the first stars started to appear. “I guess. At the very least, we should swim up and down the coast a ways, and see what there is to see. Do you think we’re on an island?”  
  
“Maybe. I dunno.” Josh closed his eyes and tried to drift off to sleep. “Guess we’ll find out in the morning.”


	2. Chapter 2

The next morning, Josh awoke to find himself and Alex in a rather compromising position. The two of them were cuddled up together on the beach, their tails wrapped together, and their faces only inches apart. Alex was still fast asleep, so Josh tried to wake her up by whispering, “Hey! Hey, Alex!”  
  
Her eyelids slid open. “Hey, Josh. What’s up?”  
  
Josh realized that Alex was gazing into his eyes, and that her cheeks had a blush to them. He glanced down and saw that her nipples were hardening. _Oh, damn,_ he thought. He just wanted to touch them, they were so beautiful; or maybe brush his lips against Alex’s mouth until the two of them were rolling around on the beach, making out together— _gah! No! Bad brain! Not allowed!_  
  
He carefully freed himself from Alex’s arms and tail and sat up on the sand, locking his arms at the elbows behind him to prop his torso up. “It’s morning. What do you want to do today?”  
  
“Let’s try checking out the coast.” She pointed up and down the beach and asked, “Which way, left or right?”  
  
Josh picked right at random, and the two of them shimmed and wiggled their way down to the water and once again dove under.  
  
It was so peaceful, swimming underneath the rolling breakers. Down in the sea, it was all just flows and currents and life and colors. It was so beautiful and so amazing, that Josh knew he was going to be sad when this vacation finally ended.  
  
He and Alex followed the coast together, surfacing occasionally, noting what they found: reefs here, shoals there. They spotted a shipwreck at one point (some kind of old-fashioned wooden sailing ship) that might be worth checking out later. And they noticed that the cost curved and curved, until they were both pretty sure that they were indeed circumnavigating an island. They actually spied another couple of shipwrecks under the water (one of which was definitely a modern, metal-hulled ship), and they also discovered that the side of the island opposite to the beach they’d arrived on lacked the intimidating cliffs: it was just a gentle, sandy beach that sloped up to the tree-line, the sand ending where the jungle started.  
  
When they were two-thirds of the way around the island, they could see the conical shape of a volcanic mountain-peak rising above, and some sand-dunes covered in beach-grass just beyond the beaches there. Then they came all the way back around to where they’d started, to the cliffs with the waterfalls and the lagoon.  
  
Only now, something was different. They could hear voices coming from the lagoon. Girl’s voices: laughing, singing. Josh and Alex looked at each other. Could it be? Did they dare to go find out?

“Well, what are you waiting for?” said Alex, excited. “Let’s go check it out!”  
  
“Wait a sec,” Josh said. “Like, what if it isn’t other merpeople? If it’s humans, should we even let them see us?”  
  
Alex shrugged. “Hell if I know.” Without another word, she took off swimming for the lagoon. 

Josh grumbled something rude and followed a little ways behind her, having a bit more caution.  
  
The lagoon was truly beautiful, with the crystal-blue waterfall spilling over the side of the cliff into a round pool filled with lily-pads and white flowers, which then emptied again over a second, smaller waterfall into the brackish water of the lagoon proper. It was here, under this second waterfall, that they both saw a gorgeous mermaid, perched on a rock and enjoying the water splashing down onto her braided black hair, chocolate-brown skin, and golden-yellow tail. She was leaning back so that her breasts (they were even bigger than Alex’s, with dark little nipples, Josh noted) were taking the brunt of the waterfall. Her tailfin flapped and splashed in the lagoon water almost involuntarily. And floating on her back in the lagoon not far away was a second mermaid, this one with a vaguely middle-eastern cast to her features: straight dark-brown hair, light brown skin, full lips, a lovely pair of breasts that stuck up out of the water as she floated, and shimmering pink scales on her tail with lavender highlights on her fins.  
  
The floating mermaid said something to the one under the waterfall and then grabbed at her own breasts and gave them a squeeze, prompting both mermaids to break into a fit of giggles. Then Alex swam into the lagoon, and the pretty Black mermaid under the waterfall stopped laughing and stared, stunned. Josh swam up behind Alex, keeping only his eyes above water; but it became obvious when the floating mermaid suddenly righted herself in the water and didn’t come any closer that he and Alex both had been seen.  
  
( _Damn_ , thought Josh, _both of these mermaids are just as gorgeous as Alex. Must just be a mermaid thing._ )  
  
Alex swam forward and waved. “Hi,” she said. “I’m new here. My name is Alex, and this is my cousin, Jo—”  
  
She was interrupted when both mermaids suddenly gave a joyful squeal, and one of them cried, “New girls! Oh my God, new girls, and two of them! We haven’t had any new girls in… how long has it been—?”  
  
“—More than ten years!” shrieked the other one. “Maybe even twenty! This is fantastic!”  
  
They both swam out into the middle of the lagoon to take a good look at Alex, and the gold-tailed, dark-skinned mermaid said (with a vague hint of a southern U.S. accent in her speech), “Hey there, beautiful. My name’s Sally, and this,” she tilted her head at the light-brown-skinned, pink-tailed mermaid, “is Yasmine. If it’s not too soon to ask, how and when did it happen? You and your cousin both at the same time, too. What a shame…”  
  
Alex, confused, asked, “How and when did what happen?”  
  
“You know,” said Yasmine (whose accent was slightly British). “How and when did you—I mean, the old, human you—die? It was pirates that got me, off the Lebanese coast, in 1982.”  
  
“1934 was a long time ago, so I don’t really remember it all that well,” added Sally. “That’s what this place does, you know. Makes you forget what your life was like as a mortal. Anyways, I do know that I was drowned by a guy who didn’t like the fact that I was shackin’ up with his girl.”  
  
Alex gasped. “Is that really where mermaids come from!? Women… who die at sea?”  
  
“Women who are _killed by men_ at sea,” corrected Yasmine. “Though it only happens to a rare few of us. You go under, you drown, it’s just about the worst fucking thing ever… and then, just when you think it’s time to ‘rest in peace’ for all eternity, bam, you wake up here instead. On the beaches of Mermaid Island, and now you’ve got a tail.”  
  
“It ain’t half bad,” said Sally. “We never age, and life’s real easy here, like one long vacation. Even if it is a little boring sometimes. The only two downsides, really, are that you can’t leave the island, and you can’t have sex.”  
  
“No sex?” whispered Alex in a small voice.  
  
Sally laughed and said, “Honey, you’ve got a _tail and scales_ now! Where do you imagine you’re gonna find a workin’ pussy in all o’ that?”  
  
“Face it, girlfriend,” said Yasmine. “You’re still you from the waist up, but from the waist down, you’re nothing but a cold fish now. Just like all the rest of us.”  
  
“And… how many of you are there?” asked Alex.  
  
“Oh, there are maybe a couple dozen other girls around the island,” answered Yasmine. “You’ll meet them all eventually. If not right away, one of these years… or decades.”  
  
“Whoa,” said Alex, awed by the thought.  
  
“So,” said Sally to Yasmine, “do you want to take fish-girl here down below and show her the ropes, or do you want to take her cousin?”  
  
“Well I don’t know,” said Yasmine playfully. “She’s shy, so I haven’t had the chance to get a good look at her and see if she’s as pretty as the lovely Miss Alex here.” She peeked around Alex and called out to Josh. “Now come on, baby, don’t be a shy little mermai—” and she froze when she finally got a look at his face. “Man. You’re a _man_.”  
  
Between the scruff of dark stubble on his face and his muscular chest, there was no denying Josh’s masculinity. But even as he flicked his tail and rose a little ways out of the water so that the two mermaids could really get a good look at his chiseled features and ripped upper-torso, Sally didn’t seem to believe it. “It can’t be a man. There _aren’t_ any mermen. There just aren’t!” She swam up to Josh and started feeling his upper body all over, and after examining his chin and his arms and his pecks, it was only then that she was at last convinced. “Well ho-lee _shit_ , you _are_ a man! Brother, I don’t know what you did or how you died to wind up here with us mermaids, but you’re the first one. Ever.”  
  
“The first ever?” Josh repeated.  
  
“As far back as any of the girls here can remember,” said Sally. “And some of ’em go way, way, waaay back.”  
  
“Are you telling me that some of the mermaids living around this island have been living here for _centuries_ , with no men?” asked Alex. “And they can’t even— _do it_ —with each other?”  
  
“Well, you’ll see how things work around here soon enough,” said Sally. She shot a poignant look at Yasmine, who flitted up to Josh and placed both of her hands delicately on his chest.  
  
Yasmine stared into Josh’s eyes, holding his gaze and never looking away, but it was Sally she addressed when she said, “Oh, him. I’m definitely taking him.”  
  
“Fine by me,” said Sally, who swam up to Alex. “I like girls better anyway. ’Specially when they’re as cute as you, gorgeous.”  
  
“Yes, I thought you might prefer things that way,” said Yasmine to Sally. There was a hint of hunger in her voice when she finally focused all of her attention on Josh and said, “but I for one have missed the touch of a real man.”  
  
Josh wasn’t sure what was about to happen, but he saw a pair of caudal fins flip up into the air and then vanish when Alex and Sally suddenly dove under water together and disappeared. Yasmine then took Josh’s hand into her own and said, “Don’t worry about your cousin, she’s quite safe in Sally’s skillful hands. You have to come with me now.”  
  
“Where are we going?” Josh asked.  
  
“Just a short ways out into the ocean,” said Yasmine mysteriously. Somehow, Josh could tell that she was holding something back, not telling him everything. “There’s something that every new arrival has to go through. You’ll find out as soon as we get there.”

* * *

Josh dove under the surface of the lagoon, with the lovely pink-tailed mermaid Yasmine holding his hand. As they swam through the water together, their tailfins undulating up and down, shafts of sunlight cut through the waves and reflected off of their glittering scales, Josh’s aqua and Yasmine’s pink. Josh couldn’t help but be distracted by Yasmine’s breathtaking beauty, and by the fact that she wasn’t at all shy about touching him, or cuddling up close to get his attention and point out some new and interesting underwater feature or example of sea-life. Josh was pretty sure that he was blushing now, and Yasmine was definitely giving him flirtatious smiles and other signals, like playing with her hair.  
  
They kept up a good pace behind Alex and Sally, and it was just the same for those two: the red-orange and golden-yellow of the two mermaids’ tails made them look like quite the attractive, tropical pair. At one point, Josh saw Sally boldly reach out and brush Alex’s hair out of the way, so that her chest was more fully exposed. _Oh, yeah_ , thought Josh, _I’m sure of it: Sally is definitely flirting too._  
  
Eventually, the four of them came to a spot in the ocean where a row of white shells and rocks formed a line in the sandy seabed, a line that extended off in either direction as far as they could see. “This is it,” said Sally to Alex and Josh. “The border-line. Some of the other girls have had centuries to make sure they’re marking the right spot, and we have all the time we could ever need to keep the markers maintained.”  
  
“It’s an almost perfect circle around the island,” added Yasmine. “Approximately seven nautical miles from the center of the volcano, as near as any of us can figure.”  
  
“What’s it for?” Josh asked.  
  
“It’s to tell us where the Barrier is,” said Sally. “Never, ever try to swim across the barrier.”  
  
“Fish and birds can come and go as they please,” said Yasmine. “But we mermaids can’t.”  
  
Alex got a shiver from their deadly-serious tone. “What happens if you try?”  
  
“It ain’t pretty,” said Sally. “Just trust us on this one.”  
  
“No,” said Yasmine. “It’s better if I show them.” She then swam down to the sea-floor, very careful to stay on the inside of the markers, and sifted through the sand until she came away with a sea-shell. She cracked the shell in half and used the sharp edge to cut several locks of hair from her head. Then, steeling her courage, she drifted up to the row of markers and cast the handful of hair over the line, quickly drawing her hand back immediately after.  
  
Josh and Alex watched in fascination and terrified revulsion as the mermaid’s hair floated across the line of marker-stones, _caught fire_ _under the water_ , and burnt away to ash.  
  
“Oh,” said Alex.  
  
“Yeah,” said Sally. “So we stay near the fuckin’ island.”  
  
“Duly noted,” said Josh.  
  
“But, wait,” said Yasmine. She looked at Josh for a moment, clearly deep in thought; and then she held the shell up to his head and asked, “May I?”  
  
“What, my hair?” he asked. (Yasmine nodded.) “Okay.”  
  
She cut away some of his hair and tried the same thing again, letting it drift across the Barrier. As before, the strands were summarily immolated the moment they passed beyond the stones. “Damn,” said Yasmine, annoyed and disappointed. “I had thought, maybe, because you’re a merman—”  
  
“You thought that because I was already breaking one rule, maybe I’d break this one too,” reasoned Josh.  
  
“Yeah,” said Yasmine sadly.  
  
“It’s okay, girl,” said Sally. “It was a good thought. But if we all gotta be stuck here for eternity, and least we’re stuck with each other.”  
  
“So,” said Yasmine, regaining her composure. (Josh got the feeling that if they had all been above water, there would be tears in her eyes right now.) “The rules. You’ve just seen Rule Number One: never cross the Barrier. We can’t leave the island, so don’t try.”  
  
“Rule Number Two,” said Sally. “All the mermaids agreed long ago, we’re happier if we just accept our fate and try to live our lives here as best we can. So before any new girls—or guys—can be accepted into the fold, we have a little ritual. You gotta tell us what year it is on the outside, and how you died, so you can put it behind you and forget about your old life.”  
  
Josh and Alex looked at each other. What could they do? Josh was at least certain that no matter what story he came up with, Alex would play along. She had always been good at that, improvising and playing off of his leads, convincing people, being Josh’s ideal partner-in-mischief. But would it be better to tell the truth about how they had become merpeople and arrived on the island, or should they make something up?  
  
Josh thought fast and decided then and there that telling these mermaids the truth about how he and Alex had come to be here might prove more troublesome in the long run. His uncle, a wizard, had zapped them here for a one-month vacation, and when that month was ended, he and Alex would get to go back to their old lives and their old human shapes? No, that might not go over so well with the mermaids who were bound to this island and trapped for all time in their fishy forms.  
  
“Well, uh, the year is 2019 now,” Josh said. “And it was, uh, my uncle who ‘got’ us. Threw us off his boat while we were out at sea, because, uh…”  
  
Alex caught on right away and finished spinning the yarn. “Because Josh’s parents are loaded, and getting us out of the way sets him up to inherit all their money someday. The backstabbing bastard!”  
  
Sally put her hands on her scaly hips and said, “Well I can tell y’all from personal experience, gettin’ tossed off a boat and drowned sure as shit ain’t no fun. That’s just awful, both of you havin’ to go through all that.”  
  
Yasmine was more fixated on the year. “2019!? That means I’ve been a mermaid for… for nearly forty years!”  
  
Sally laughed. “Startin’ to lose count? Don’t worry, it happens to all of us eventually. Hard to keep track ’round here, when nothin’ hardly ever changes.”  
  
“Yes, well, at least I haven’t forgotten what it was like to be human,” retorted Yasmine. She gave a wistful sigh and said, “Going on walks. Going out with boys. Dinner in restaurants. Dance clubs. Movies… oh, God, I miss movies!”  
  
A thought came to Josh. He asked Yasmine, “You said earlier that you woke up here as a mermaid after dying in 1982?” (She nodded.) “Damn, that sucks. You missed out on seeing _Return of the Jedi_ by one year.”  
  
She stared at Josh; blinked twice; it was as if a deeply buried memory were fighting its way to the surface. Then she shouted, “ **There was a sequel to _The Empire Strikes Back_!?!?**” (Josh found her posh English accent terribly cute when she was yelling about something so nerdy.)  
  
He nodded, and she griped his hand tightly and said, “Come on, you have to tell me all about it! Storytelling may not be as good as going to the cinema, but it’s the best we can get around here!” She took him by the arm and pulled him away from Sally and Alex.  
  
As they departed, Sally shouted after Yasmine, “Hey, wait, what about Rule Number Three?”  
  
“I’ll tell him!” Yasmine shouted back, dragging Josh away to somewhere private.

* * *

Alex was left alone with Sally, who wasted no time getting right back down to business with the island’s newest mer-girl. “All right,” she said, “Rule Number Three. This is the last one.” She took Alex by the hand and gently led her away from the Barrier, until the border-markers were nowhere in sight. The two mermaids swam hand-in-hand until they came to a pretty, pink patch of coral reefs, surrounded by anemones and sea-sponges and undersea blossoms. “Right here is good,” said Sally. “Lie down on the seabed. Make yourself comfortable.”  
  
“Okay,” said Alex. The recently-transformed, orange-tailed mermaid allowed herself to sink down and recline on the sand. Her tailfin flapped gently in the ebb of the ocean currents, stirring up little clouds of silt. She propped herself up on her elbows and watched Sally intently, curious to see what the gold-tailed mermaid was going to say or do next.  
  
Sally floated down a little ways until she was hovering in the water just above Alex. Then she reached out, took Alex’s face in her hands, and kissed the other mermaid full on the lips.  
  
Alex, for her part, had already guessed that Sally was going to make a move on her. But she didn’t know quite how she felt about it. As a human, Alex had always strongly identified as a girl herself, but she didn’t have a marked sexual preference for girls or boys either way. _Hm, guess this means that I’m bi after all_ , she thought to herself, because Sally’s kiss definitely felt _right_. It was a huge turn-on for Alex, and she threw her arms around Sally and returned her kiss with fervor. Sally’s first tentative lip-grazes were very quickly replaced by mutual French-kissing, and as they made out, the two mermaids embraced tightly, mashing their breasts together between them.  
  
“Your taste,” said Sally in breaks between kisses. “So sexy.”  
  
Alex, her whole body flushed with arousal, writhed underneath Sally, her tail flapping wildly. “I thought—you said—we couldn’t do this,” she gasped.  
  
Sally was kissing her way down Alex’s neck now and said, “Just you wait, honey. You’ll see.” She peppered Alex’s collarbone with gentle pecks and seductive strokes of her tongue, and then she moved down to Alex’s melon-sized knockers and began teasing her nipples with wanton abandon, a playful mix of finger-flicks, running her thumb around the nipple in soft circles, long lewd licks, and suckling.  
  
Alex threw her head back and cried out when she first felt Sally’s deft tongue on her boob. Her body tensed up, she hugged Sally tightly to her torso, and her tail wound around Sally’s, pinning the two mermaids together. Sally carried on, relishing every sweet kiss she could place upon the newest mermaid’s gorgeous, pale breasts, and she took a small bit of sadistic pleasure in the ease with which she was driving Alex to the limits of her tolerance. And yet, she didn’t quit; she aggressively, passionately kept on pleasuring Alex’s human upper body, until, after a great many long minutes had gone by, Alex was at last reduced to hyperventilating gasps and begging Sally to stop.  
  
And so she did. Sally sat up off of Alex, demurely primping her braided hair, and asked in a disinterested tone, “Well, sugar-tits, how do you feel?”  
  
Alex was still half out of her mind with lust and groaned, “I’m so fucking horny! I just want to _come_ —sooo bad!” She reached down and felt all over the scales on the belly of her tail, where her groin used to be, and back around to the scales on the solid lump of muscle that used to be her butt, but there was no interesting anatomy to find: no sex organs, no penetrable orifices, nothing. “Come on,” said Alex desperately, trying in futility to pry up one of the scales on the front of her tail, just below her waist. “I can feel _something_ in there! It’s gotta be my pussy, it just has to be!”  
  
“What you’re feelin’, babe, is a little extra mucus on the inside of your egg-hole,” said Sally matter-of-factly. “It’s what happens when mermaids get aroused. In fact, it’s the _only_ thing that happens when mermaids get aroused.”  
  
Alex gaped at Sally. “But… but, we were… and… and you…?” She balled her fists and pounded them into the sea-floor in frustration. Then Alex looked up at Sally again and asked, “So why didn’t I finish? Shouldn’t I be laying a bunch of nasty fish-eggs right now?”  
  
Sally shrugged. “Nah. A girl’s egg-hole only does that once a year, in the spring. ’Smatter of fact, it’s the only good way to keep track of the years around here, when all the girls get all moody and squirt a bunch of eggs all over everywhere and kingdom come. You can’t use the night sky, that’s for damn sure; the stars above Mermaid Island are all kinds of fucked up, and never the same two nights in a row.”  
  
Alex, meanwhile, had at last located the tiny slit in her groin, and she touched it with the tip of her finger. It was mildly sensitive, but the feeling was more “ticklish spot” than “erogenous zone”. She decided to try and push her finger in, but she found that she couldn’t manage it: either the opening was simply too small, or the muscles were clenched too tightly and wouldn’t give. Either way, even her pinky finger didn’t fit.  
  
“Oh, don’t do that,” said Sally. “Trust me, you’ll only wind up hurtin’ yourself that way.”  
  
“Trust you!?” snaped Alex. “I _did_ trust you! Why the fuck did you do this to me? Kiss me, get me all worked up, and—and—”  
  
“Rule Number Three,” said Sally. “You’re still human from the waist up. Still the same human you were, ’cept that you won’t get no older. But from the waist down, you ain’t got nothin’ that feels any good. No pussy, no clit, no butthole, no nothin’.  
  
“It’s like those poor soldiers who got hit in the spine during the Great War, or caught some shrapnel in the prick and had to have it amputated. They may still _want_ it, but they just can’t _feel_ it down below no more, and maybe they ain’t even got the parts for doin’ it. That’s what it’s like to be a mermaid.  
  
“Rule Number Three is makin’ sure you understand that. You can fool around all you like with any girls that might be willing, but most won’t want to take it much further than a little kissin’ and pettin’ and maybe playin’ with each other’s titties. You understand what I’m sayin’?”  
  
Alex nodded. She was still horny as hell, but she realized the truth of what Sally was saying. “Rule Number Three. As long as I’m a mermaid, my body will crave sex just as much as it always did before. But because of my fishtail, there’s no way I can come, so I shouldn’t even try.”  
  
Sally said, “That’s it; you’ve pretty much got it. But you can forget right now about that ‘as long as’ business. You’re stuck here, and you’re a mermaid now for keeps. You’ll never change back into a real woman, and you’ll never grow old and die. The only way out is to swim over that line and let yourself burn up—and you wouldn’t be the first girl to finally snap and do just that—but for most of us, it ain’t worth it. Better horny and alive, than dead and gone.”  
  
Alex heaved a sigh, and one big bubble of air escaped from her mouth and floated for the surface. Being a mermaid was going to prove a challenge, it seemed. She would have to find other activities to distract herself for the rest of the month. And as for these poor mermaids who had to live this way for decades and centuries, she just couldn’t even process that. The mermaids had Alex’s sympathy; but for her part, she was very glad that she wasn’t truly permanently one of them.


	3. Chapter 3

Josh and Yasmine were back at the lagoon, hanging out on the rocks under the waterfall. Josh had to admit, he found it pretty relaxing, feeling the cool water splash down from on high and run down his back and his fishtail. His mermaid companion looked positively enticing with the rivulets and droplets of water coursing down her hair and breasts. He had been catching her up on the movies that she’d missed during the last four decades, and she was hanging on his every word.  
  
“Ewoks?” she giggled. “Seriously?”  
  
Josh shrugged. “Blame George Lucas.”  
  
Yasmine wiggled her scaly butt so that she could shimmy closer to Josh on the rock and cuddle up close to him. She placed a hand on his chest, and her tailfin brushed suggestively against his own. She gazed into his eyes and said quietly, “I haven’t seen a film in nearly forty years, and I haven’t seen a man in just as long. So, I’m going to kiss you now.”  
  
Josh didn’t object, and so the mermaid leaned closer and brushed her lips against his. He responded to her kiss enthusiastically and took Yasmine into his arms, and she moaned into his mouth, clearly enjoying herself. Their tongues touched, and as the minutes ticked by, their lips became pleasantly numb from making out. Then Josh felt Yasmine’s tail wrap around his and pull, and the both of them slid off the rock and plunged under the surface of the lagoon together.  
  
It was heaven: hovering under the water in a tropical paradise of a lagoon, a sexy mermaid wrapped around him, kissing him with abandon. Josh reached for both of Yasmine’s buoyant, voluminous breasts and give them an experimental squeeze; they were the most exquisite pair that he’d ever felt. He was just about to take things to the next level and play with her nipples, when she broke off the kiss and stopped him. She was breathing heavily and had a dazed look on her face. (It was just now that Josh really noticed for the first time: neither he nor any of the mermaids had anything like gills. Somehow, their lungs were equally adapted to breathing water and air.) Yasmine said, “Wait. Before we take this any further, I have to explain Rule Number Three.”  
  
“Oh, yeah,” said Josh. He was feeling pretty hot and bothered now too, the same as Yasmine, and his pulse and heavy breathing reflect that. “Uh… Rule Number One was, don’t try to leave the island or you’ll die. Rule Number Two, the mer-change thing is permanent, so get over it. And I’m guessing that Rule Number Three has something to do with sex?”  
  
Yasmine nodded. “Simply put, mermaids can’t have sex. We don’t have the anatomy for it. We can’t even orgasm. And believe me, some of the mermaids have been here for _literal_ centuries, and they’ve tried everything you could ever think of, and some things that would never occur to you. But it’s never happened.”  
  
“Never even once?”  
  
Yasmine shook her head sadly. “Not that any mermaid has ever heard of. Basically, we’re all still wired just like humans in terms of hormones and brain chemistry and everything, and we all still _want_ sex. But it’s just plain impossible to make our fishy parts feel pleasure enough to climax. We can get really close from nipple-stimulation, but in the end, it just leads to unsatisfied arousal and constant sexual frustration.”  
  
“Damn,” said Josh with a heavy breath. “That… really sucks.”  
  
“Tell me about it,” said Yasmine. She was still holding onto Josh in a loose embrace, but she didn’t make another move to continue their love-play. She was waiting for him to decide what to do next.  
  
He thought for a moment and asked, “So, uh, even if we can’t have sex, do mermaids still have — uh, genitals, or anything like that? Some way to reproduce?”  
  
“Well, reproduction has always been out of the question,” said Yasmine, “because there have never been any mermen until you came along. But to answer your question, yes, we do have a… a hole there,” she indicated her midsection, where her groin would be if she were still a woman, “tiny, and just about impossible to open if it’s not the right time of year.” She smiled sadly and explained, “On one particular day every spring, all of us mermaids suddenly feel compelled to lay our eggs out in the open waters. It’s… it doesn’t feel like anything. Except maybe cramps and squirting—like having a really chunky period.”  
  
“Ew.”  
  
“Yeah.” After a long pause, Yasmine continued, “Still, it’s just been so long since I’ve been held in a man’s arms, I’d really like to keep going with you for a while. If you don’t mind. Even knowing how this will end.”  
  
“All right,” said Josh. “But, uh… maybe we could start by checking to see how my, uh, anatomy is different from yours? I have to admit, I’ve been curious about it, and I haven’t really had the chance to, um, check myself out.”  
  
Yasmine smiled, and this time it genuinely reached her eyes. “That sounds like a lovely idea. Now you have me curious too, to find out what a merman is like below the belt.”  
  
“I’m, uh, pretty sure I don’t have a penis anymore,” he admitted. “I mean, you’re super hot, so if I did, I’d definitely be feeling it, and, uh…” he blushed, embarrassed to admit it, “I’m not really feeling anything down there now.”  
  
Yasmine smiled at the complement and then sighed and let herself sink down a couple of feet so that her head was level with Josh’s waist in the water. “That’s pretty typical for us merfolk,” she said. She started feeling around the front of his tail, and as she examined him, she said, “So far, you’re one and one when it comes to our expectations: on the one hand, none of us ever expected to see a merman at all; but on the other, you’re trapped here just like we are.” Then, Josh felt something tickle him in the general groin-region of his fishy midsection, and Yasmine pronounced, “Well, you’ve got a slit here too, but it’s even smaller than a mermaid’s—I almost missed it.”  
  
She lightly kissed Josh’s scales and ran her tongue over the minuscule opening. The feeling was pleasant, he decided, but underwhelming; and when Yasmine asked him about it, he said as much. She sighed again and said, “Well, so far that makes you two and one in the merm—oh, hello.” Now she noticed a slight bulge in his tail, just below the slit. “What have we here?” She prodded at the spot with her finger, and Josh’s eyes practically rolled back into his head.  
  
“Unh—careful there. I think that’s where my—my balls are. Um, inside me, I mean; down under the scales.”  
  
Yasmine gasped and covered her mouth with her hand. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry! Did that hurt?”  
  
“Just please don’t ever punch me there.”  
  
Yasmine giggled; then she got a look of wicked mischief on her face, and she began to kiss at Josh’s slit and play with the slightly-bulging spot with her fingers and lips. That felt… well it was certainly something else. Arousing, but nothing like sex. Nevertheless, the excitement of making love to a mermaid came back with a vengeance, and Josh now decided to return the favor to Yasmine, spinning their bodies around in the water so that they were floating opposite to each other, not quite in a sixty-nine position, but instead angled so that he was able to play with her breasts and suck on her nipples, and Yasmine could simultaneously do the same to Josh’s masculine chest.  
  
They drove each other to the limits of arousal, and eventually, as they both knew that it must, frustration won out. Josh and Yasmine collapsed together into a loving embrace as they sank to the bottom of the lagoon.  
  
As Josh come down from the buzzing, painful-pleasurable feeling of over-stimulation in his nipples, he lay on the sandy seabed with his arm around Yasmine’s shoulders, and she cuddled him close. She casually drew a finger down the length of his torso, following his pecks, his abs, and down to the front of his tail again. She once again came to the spot where his gonads were locked away underneath a layer of muscle and fish-scales. She played with the little bump again and swirled her finger around Josh’s slit, and quite by accident, she triggered an unexpected reaction in his body: he felt his testicles tighten up, and the muscles in his fish-groin contracted, and suddenly a cloud of milky white fluid spurted out into the water.  
  
Josh and Yasmine both stared at the floating semen-cloud in no small measure of surprise. She gawked at his ejaculate and exclaimed, “Did you just _come_!?”  
  
“No,” said Josh. “I mean, yes, obviously, but also no. There was no orgasm, no tingle, no nothing. Just…”  
  
“Just what?”  
  
“I don’t know, a kind of relaxing feeling?” he explained. “It felt… more like peeing than cumming.”  
  
For some reason, Yasmine found that hilarious: she burst into peals of laughter and said, “Oh, well that’s good then; both of our genders’ reproductive acts can be equally gross together.”  
  
Josh snickered along with Yasmine and then rolled over and kissed her. “Well, now I guess we know how you make a merman fertilize mermaid eggs when the time comes.”  
  
Yasmine’s eyes went wide. “You’re right! We could actually… reproduce! For the first time in hundreds and hundreds of years, we could make little mer-babies!”  
  
Josh froze up at the notion. “That actually doesn’t sound like such a good idea,” he said. “The area within the Barrier is so small—would there really be enough food to go around, if your population started growing?”  
  
“Oh, that doesn’t matter!” said Yasmine. “Mermaids are immortal! We can feel hunger, but we can’t ever starve.”  
  
“That’s weird.”  
  
Yasmine ignored his comment, suddenly very excited. “I think I have to tell the others about you as soon as possible! The Queen is definitely going to want to meet you, and—”  
  
“There’s a Queen? A Mermaid Queen!?”  
  
“Oh, yes,” said Yasmine. “The eldest mermaid. She and her closest friends have been here the longest. Now, let me see; what must I do to contact them?”  
  
While Yasmine pondered and muttered to herself, Josh took a little swim around the interior of the lagoon. It really was a beautiful place; and he also discovered something interesting. There was a little cave behind the waterfall, a tunnel that led somewhere into the cliffs that surrounded the lagoon. _Hm,_ he thought to himself, _that might be worth exploring sometime._ He also remembered that there were other beaches on the island where he could maybe explore inland a little bit, and a few shipwrecks to check out as well.

* * *

Josh felt that he would much rather do some more exploring than wait around to meet some stuffy, ancient mermaid queen. But, for some reason, going off on his own seemed like a bad idea. He liked being around Yasmine, but she seemed pretty intent on this whole “telling all the other mermaids about him” idea; and so that only left one option, namely waiting for Alex to get back.  
  
He didn’t have to wait for very long. Soon enough, his cousin and Sally came swimming back into the lagoon, Sally looking rather smug and Alex grumpy. “What’s eating you?” he asked.  
  
“Nobody, that’s the problem,” Alex grumbled. She glared at Sally, who just smiled sweetly back and then swam over to chat with Yasmine, leaving the two cousins to speak in private.  
  
“Pardon?” said Josh.  
  
“I’m horny!” Alex snaped. “I’m horny, and mermaids can’t cum.”  
  
Josh nodded. “Yeah, I just got a little demonstration of that myself.”  
  
Alex scowled. “Then why are you in such a good mood?”  
  
He decided to be honest with her. “Apparently, it works a little differently for mermen. I can’t have an orgasm either, but at least after trying, I can still ejaculate, and the tension goes away. Kind of.”  
  
“Lucky fucking you,” she griped.  
  
“Look,” Josh suggested, “why don’t we just go do something to distract ourselves? Clearly, we’ve got to keep our minds off of sex as best we can for the next month, so let’s go exploring. I’ve been wanting to check out those shipwrecks we saw.”  
  
Alex was still in a sulky mood, but she nodded. “Fine.”  
  
The twosome turned to leave the lagoon, but they were stopped by Sally and Yasmine. Sally told Josh, “We’re gonna round up as many of the girls as we can find and get the word out that you’re here.”  
  
Yasmine nodded and said, “We’ve agreed that that’s the best way to reach the Queen: just tell whoever we see and wait for the gossip to spread. It will happen more quickly than you realize.” Yasmine then swam up to Josh, threw her arms around his neck, and kissed him on the lips, while at the same time deftly brushing her boobs against his chest so that her nipples lightly grazed his, making them both shiver. “I had fun, lover. Let’s do it again some time really soon.”  
  
Then, to Josh’s great surprise, Sally swam up behind Yasmine, and she kissed him as well. He hadn’t expected that, but he kissed her back just the same; after all, she was as gorgeous as she was spunky and outgoing. “What was that for?” he asked.  
  
“Just a little ‘ta ta for now,’ honey,” said Sally. “But I wanna have a go at you myself, and soon, ’cause once the other girls find out there’s a man here? Hoo- _wee_ , you won’t be gettin’ _any_ rest.” She turned to Alex and said, “And you, beautiful, can get just as much action, if you want it. Trust me, with tits and fins like those, you’ll be able to catch the eye of any girl you want.” Sally planted an even more sensual kiss on Alex’s lips, and Alex just sort of floated there and let her do it, without actually saying or doing anything to either encourage or dissuade her.  
  
When Sally finally pulled away, she asked, “You still mad at me for earlier, sugar?”  
  
“A little,” Alex confessed. “I just would have liked a warning, that’s all. I’ll get over it.”  
  
Sally nodded, and then she and Yasmine swam away.  
  
“God, it’s gonna be a long month,” said Alex.

* * *

Josh and Alex swam back around the island again, in the same direction that they had taken before meeting the other mermaids. They explored the wreck of the old wooden galleon and found the tattered remains of a Jolly Roger still clinging to the mast. It was a pirate ship!  
  
“Look at this,” Josh said to Alex, when he found a rusty cutlass. He tried to swing the sword in the water; but it proved to be too draggy and awkward to serve as a practical weapon for a merman.  
  
Alex giggled. “The Dread Pirate Roberts, you are not.”  
  
Josh grinned. “But at least I’ve-a studied my Agrippa and Capo Ferro!” He playfully thrust the blade out in the water and waved it like a fencer. “’Allo! My name is Inigo Montoya! You keelled my father; prepare to die!”  
  
Alex burst out laughing at Josh’s terrible accent. Josh then discarded the sword and went back to poking through the ship’s remains. He found lots of rusty junk; no sign of bones (they probably disintegrated long ago, he supposed); and then Alex swam into the captain’s cabin and let out a yell. Josh joined her at the door to the cabin; it was dark in there, and he couldn’t really see. But Alex came swimming out with a small, rusty, iron box in her hands. The lid was open; it was filled with gold doubloons and jewels.  
  
“Wow,” said Josh, “that’s gotta be worth a fortune.” He picked up some of the coins. They were Spanish, maybe 16th century; paper-thin compared to modern coins, but still surprisingly heavy because they were made of solid gold.  
  
Alex took out a long string of pearls, wound them into a necklace, and placed them over her head. Then she put on a bejeweled tiara, several bracelets and rings of silver and gold, and a bangle for one of her upper arms. “Look!” she said with glee. “I’m a princess-under-the-sea!”  
  
“Cute.”  
  
“Damn skippy.” Alex pouted her lips, thrust out her naked chest, and struck a _Playboy_ -model pose with her fishtail swishing in the water underneath her. “What do think? Will I drive the other mer-girls wild?”  
  
_Damn, but Alex makes a sexy mermaid,_ thought Josh. But he didn’t answer her, because he was afraid of how they might both react if he told the truth, and he simply didn’t have the heart to lie. So, he changed the subject: “Come on, Ariel, we’ve still got two more wrecks to explore.”

* * *

The metal-hulled wreck turned out to be an early 20th century passenger-liner. Josh and Alex didn’t find much of anything interesting in there, except for a watertight locker in one of the cabins that happened to contain some women’s clothing. Alex discovered an old-fashioned looking polka-dot two-piece swimsuit among the clothes, and just for fun she claimed the bikini top and put it on. She said that she was grateful to finally give “the girls” a bit of support; while for Josh’s part, he was just grateful that his cousin was finally covering herself up around him.

* * *

The last wreckage, the one that they hadn’t been able to identify earlier, was in terrible shape. The wood was so old that it almost looked petrified. Eventually, they found a large piece that bore the distinctive bow-shape of an ancient trireme, or something a lot like it. Sifting among the wreckage here, the only object of interest that they discovered was a silver medallion on a loop of chain, depicting an image of a fish-tailed woman with bird’s wings. There was writing on the medallion too, in what looked like an old form of Ancient Greek: Josh squinted and managed to make out the letters _delta–rho–kappa–tau_. “DRKT”?  
  
Alex looked at the medallion and suggested, “Maybe it’s an image of Derceto.”  
  
“Who?”  
  
“Some ancient mermaid goddess.”  
  
Josh stared at her. “How do you know that?”  
  
“My dad’s a wizard, remember?” she replied. “I know magic stuff. Or at least, mythology stuff.”  
  
Josh shrugged, put on the medallion, and asked Alex what she wanted to do next.

* * *

Eventually, Alex and Josh decided to go back to the lagoon and see if Sally and Yasmine were back with any news. But as they swam back, they surfaced not far from the beach where they had both initially found themselves transported here, and they spotted another mermaid that neither of them had met before. This mermaid was lounging on the sand and basking in the evening sun. She had red hair, fair skin with cute red freckles, and the classic green-scaled mermaid tail and silver-green fins. Her eyes were closed as she soaked up the sun’s rays, and it was apparent from her pale and flawless peach-sized bosoms that no matter how much a mermaid sunned herself, she would neither tan nor burn. Likely another effect of the magic that kept them ageless and immortal, Josh supposed.  
  
Alex seemed rather taken by this Celtic-featured beauty and called out to her, “Hello!” She swam up, beached herself, and introduced herself. “Hi! I’m Alex, and this is my cousin, Josh. We’re both new here.”  
  
The ginger mermaid stared at Josh, wide eyed. “By Christ,” she swore, her voice colored with a lilting Scottish brogue. “I did nae ken there could even be merrow- _men_ here!”  
  
Josh pulled himself up onto the sand with his powerful arms, his tail naught but a deadweight dragging behind him. “Yeah, so I’ve heard. Apparently, I’m the first.”  
  
“And such bonnie, braw lad, too!” exclaimed the mermaid, clearly smitten. “Och, but where are me manners? I’m Fiona. Fiona Mac… uh, Mac… well, it was Mac-something, long ago.”  
  
“How long, if you don’t mind my asking?” said Alex.  
  
“Um… in the year of our Lord, seventeen fifty- or sixty-something, thereabouts,” said Fiona. “I ken that I was sailing across the ocean, but nae how or why I died.”  
  
Josh and Alex went on to strike up a conversation with Fiona, getting to know her, even though she didn’t actually remember much of her human life. She was a little surprised to hear that the year “out there” was now 2019, and she either didn’t believe or couldn’t understand half of what the two newcomers tried to tell her about modern life and modern-day technology. But the entire time that the three of them chatted, Alex was boldly flirting with Fiona, cuddling up close to her, touching her, brushing their tails together. And Josh was pretty sure that Fiona was all but oblivious to Alex’s advances, because _she_ was openly doing the very same thing to _him_.  
  
Eventually, Fiona abandoned any pretense of subtlety and put her arms around Josh’s neck. “Och, but I’ve missed the feel of having a strong man in me arms. Can we take a tumble now?”  
  
“Hey!” said Alex. “What am I, chopped liver?”  
  
Fiona kept one arm around Josh’s shoulders and put the other around Alex’s. “Dinnae fash yerself, lassie! Sometimes three is better than two, especially when ye cannae feel naught for sportin’ any lower than your paps!” She drew Alex into a sweet kiss, and Alex responded with unbridled enthusiasm. Fiona, though, was eager to get Josh in on the action, and so she soon turned her attention to him, kissing the merman all over while Alex used her lips to worship Fiona’s tight body.  
  
Fiona proved to be a lover more selfish than generous: she basked in whatever attention Josh and Alex were willing to lavish on her adorable little breasts, and she had no compunctions about being driven up to that frenzied, agonizing limit of frustration that seemed to be endemic to the mermaid condition. Neither Josh nor Alex invited Fiona to take them to that selfsame brink, and so it remained a mostly one-sided encounter that went on until Fiona could at last take no more and sighed, still horny and unsatisfied, but momentarily done with what passed for sex among the mermaids.  
  
As she rested on the beach and recovered from the brief three-way, Fiona said quietly, “Do ye think this island is a part o’ Purgatory?”  
  
Josh blinked. _What a random thing to say._ “Purgatory? Like, some place in between Heaven and Hell?”  
  
“Aye,” said Fiona. “We _are_ dead, after all. Dead, and yet somehow still alive in this place.” She casually lifted up a handful of sparkling sand and let it sift through her fingers back down onto the beach. “Some o’ the lassies here think that this be Purgatory, and we’ll only go onto whatever’s next when we cannae stand it anymore and try to swim away.”  
  
“It’s possible,” said Alex. “But I don’t think there’s any way to be sure.”  
  
“No, I suppose not,” said Fiona. “At any rate, I haven’t the courage to try; nae yet. I’m still content to just… be here. Frolic in the waves, bask in the sun,” she smiled, “sport wi’ the lassies.” She fixed her eyes on Josh and said, “And with a bonnie merrow-man, at last, after two-hundred and fifty long, _long_ years!” She leaned over, kissed him, and thanked him for the brief bout of “sport” (as she called it). “When the springtime comes, do say you’ll find me and have a go at my eggs, please?” She looked at the merman pleadingly. “I’d just adore having a bairn to call me very own!”  
  
“Oh, I’m pretty sure every mermaid is going to be asking me that,” Josh said. “But, uh, if it’s first-come, first serve, you’re pretty high up on the list. Like, only third or fourth in line.”  
  
“Well that’s nae so bad,” said Fiona with a sexy grin.  
  
With that, they took their leave of the Gaelic mermaid and pressed onto the lagoon.


	4. Chapter 4

When Josh and Alex got back to the lagoon, it looked deserted at first. The sun was going down, and the tall cliff-walls all around it hid the whole place in deep shadows. There were no mermaids perched on the rocks here, nor basking in the waterfalls, nor lounging in the high fresh-water pools that spilled into the brackish inlet.  
  
But then Alex dove underwater and pulled Josh down with her, and she pointed: on the sandy bottom of the lagoon, Sally and Yasmine were reclining together and chatting with two other pretty mermaids, one with fair skin and straw-colored hair that floated around her head like a golden halo, the other with a yellow-tan cast to her features and short, straight, black hair framing her cute, round face. After some brief introductions, Josh and Alex made the acquaintance of Liesl, who had been the daughter of a Bohemian duke in the 1500s Holy Roman Empire; and Xiuying, a onetime Imperial handmaiden from Yuan-dynasty China.  
  
Their reaction to meeting Josh was much the same as the other mermaids’ had been so far: Xiuying, starved for male attention after nearly eight hundred years without, wanted to have him right then and there; and Liesl was clearly intrigued by the merman as well, but she immediately took to Alex and offered to fool around with her while Josh remained occupied with the enchanting Miss Xiuying. For whatever reason, they both seemed to speak perfect English, though accented to sound German and Chinese respectively. Josh briefly wondered whether they’d actually learned the language (which was possible, given how long they’d both been on Mermaid Island and how little there was to do here), or whether there wasn’t some magic at work that overcame the language barrier for everybody automatically.  
  
Josh didn’t have long to wonder, though, before Xiuying was all over him, passionately trying to drive him to the heights of arousal possible for merfolk; and Liesl was locked in a lewd embrace with Alex, taking things a bit more leisurely. Alex and Liesl merely petted and played with each other, kissing and enjoying the closeness, but not intent on pushing their limits. Xiuying, though, saw to it that for the second time that day, Josh was eventually gasping in agony from getting hot and bothered by a mermaid while at the same time being totally, completely, physically incapable of orgasm. Once he reached the point where he couldn’t possibly take it anymore, Josh pried the enthusiastic mermaid away from his lips, sucked in a few deep breaths of brackish lagoon-water to calm himself down, and then directed Xiuying down to his fish-groin, pushing her down a little so that her head was level with his midsection. Liesl and Alex watched in fascination as the Chinese mermaid stuck out her tongue and tentatively lapped at Josh’s belly-scales, stimulating his milt-slit and his buried, inaccessible testes—until he released his seed into the water with a contented sigh.  
  
“ _Glücklich_ ,” whispered Liesl at the sight of the merman’s ejaculate, and Xiuying rose up again so that she and Josh were face to face. “She says you’re lucky,” translated Xiuying, who then embraced and kissed Josh, and thanked him for the experience. He thanked her back, and she swam over to Liesl so that the two mermaids could cuddle up together and go to sleep on the seabed together.  
  
Yasmine then pulled Josh down onto the sand and wound her tail around his. “Good night, handsome,” she said, briefly caressing his face. He kissed her and readied himself to fall asleep. Sally bedded down on the other side of Yasmine, and Liesl reached out invitingly to Alex. Soon, Josh and Alex, each snuggled up as one third of a trio of merpeople, drifted off into dreamland.

* * *

The next two weeks of Josh and Alex’s spontaneous magical merfolk vacation flew by, and in much the same fashion as their first couple of days here on Mermaid Island. They explored the ocean, they explored the shallow waters and the coral reefs, the crags and trenches in the rocky underwater shoals, and the beaches on all sides of the island. They met nearly a dozen more mermaids, which very often led to love-making, sometimes heated and sometimes as slow and casual and natural as the ebb and flow of the tides.  
  
Alex really seemed to like meeting new mermaids: she went after each and every fish-girl who would have her, and she seemed to enjoy the variety of a different partner as often as she could switch it up.  
  
Josh found that he was both randy enough and courteous enough to oblige any mermaid who propositioned him on the spot. But when it came to initiating a bout of love-play with one of the mermaids, it was nearly always the case that he preferred to have his sexy-times with Yasmine, in whom he had begun to develop quite the serious romantic interest.  
  
Then, one day, a little over halfway through the month, Josh was playing in the lagoon with the rest of the mermaids there (actually _playing_ —as in, swimming around, playing tag and hide-and-seek and so forth), when the sound of a conch-shell horn being blown out over the open waters drifted between the cliff-walls and into the lagoon. The mermaids all stopped what they were doing and pulled themselves up onto rocks (making the place look for all the world like the Mermaid’s Lagoon of Neverland, from _Peter Pan_ ), and they all faced the lagoon-entrance.  
  
Yasmine took Josh by the hand and said, “She’s here. The Queen is coming.”  
  
Normally, when the mermaids gathered, they would chatter and prattle endlessly. They were very social, and seldom serious about anything. But now, the lagoon fell silent, and three regal mermaids, breathtaking in their stately and classical beauty, swam into the lagoon. They came to a halt before Josh and Alex, and with skillful motions of their tailfins, they rose up out of the water just to the waistline, so that their bare human upper-halves were exposed for all the world to see, while their scaly fishtails remained just beneath the surface. (How they managed to balance like that and at the same time tread water in one place was a total mystery to Josh.)  
  
The Mermaid Queen had tan skin, straight black hair a bit longer than shoulder-length, and deep brown eyes that seem to penetrate the soul. She looked every bit like the stereotypical notion of an Ancient Egyptian ruler, as if Cleopatra herself were swimming there in the flesh, bare-breasted and with her legs replaced by a fishtail. The two mermaidens flanking the Queen carried themselves with the same noble mien: one was fair and golden-haired, with Grecian features and scales of dark blue; while the other had light brown skin and curly dark-brown hair which were both similar in shade to Yasmine’s, and a rose-red colored tail. The Queen’s tail had an exotic, striped pattern of tropical yellow alternating with narrower bands of azure blue.  
  
Josh began to feel unnerved by the Queen’s staring, and so he broke the silence with his best attempt at making a bow while at the same time treading water. “Your Majesty.”  
  
“You will not speak until you are addressed,” snaped the golden-haired mermaid. Josh shut his mouth and decided to await the Queen’s pleasure.  
  
Finally, the Queen said, “This is most unexpected. The power of the Goddess is unwelcoming to men. Tell me, child: were you a man before you appeared here?”  
  
“Y-yes,” stammered Josh. “I mean, yes I was, Your Majesty.”

“I see,” said the Queen. “And now you are a… a _merman_ ,” she tested the unfamiliar word on her tongue, and it felt like an insult the way she said it. An affront. A sacrilege. “Tell me, merman, how many floods of the Nile had you seen before your death?”  
  
“Huh?”  
  
Alex elbowed her cousin. “She means, how old are you?”  
  
“Oh,” said Josh. “Um—I just turned twenty-one.”  
  
“I see,” said the Queen. She looked Josh in the eye and said, “And tell me—have you ever raised your hand to strike a woman, or otherwise done violence to, or forced yourself upon—”  
  
But Josh couldn’t just swim there and take an accusation like that. “What!? No, of course not! I would never!”  
  
“He wouldn’t!” said Alex. “How dare you!?”  
  
The Queen merely raised one eyebrow and looked down her nose at the both of them. “Well,” she said to Josh, “since you have one of the Goddess’s beloved daughters to vouch for you, perhaps we can allow you to stay after all.” As she spoke, she reached out for Josh’s chest—but she didn’t quite touch it. She looked as if she wanted to, but she was holding back.  
  
“What other choice do you have?” asked Alex. “It’s not like you can just get rid of him!”  
  
The other handmaiden was about to snap at Alex for her rudeness, but the Queen held up a hand to stop her. The Queen told Alex, “You may not be aware of this, but he breaks our most sacred law merely by being here. This island first came into being as a refuge for the souls of women who had been brutalized by seafaring men. The ground of the island itself, and all the waters around it, are consecrated—made sacred to the great Goddess, Atargatis.”  
  
Alex smacked herself on the forehead in realization. “Atargatis! Of course!” When Josh gave her a questioning look, she turned to him and explained, “Ancient Canaanite fertility and moon goddess. Mythology’s first mermaid. Derceto was her name in Greek.”  
  
“Oh,” said Josh. He took off the amulet that they’d found together in the shipwreck and held it out to Alex. “Like on this medallion.”  
  
“That amulet!” said the Queen suddenly. “Let me see it!”  
  
She was so insistent, almost panicky in the way she spoke, that Josh acceded at once and handed the artifact over. The Queen’s hands shook as she took it from him, and she ran her fingers over the image of the winged siren-mermaid-goddess and the Greek letters. Then she read them aloud, “Derketo. Greek. Bah! This is not _my_ sacred relic. For a moment I’d thought—hoped—that you’d found it.” She handed the medallion back to Josh and asked, “What are your names?”  
  
The pair introduced themselves simply as Josh and Alex, and the Queen continued, “Well, I am Nephi, Queen of Mermaid Island, and these are my handmaidens, Thetis and Miriam. You, Alex, are of course welcome among us, for you are now a mermaid, like all the favored daughters of the Goddess. But as for you…” she faced Josh but didn’t speak his name, “the presence of a male _complicates_ matters.”  
  
“How so?” Josh asked.  
  
“In twenty days’ time, the spring equinox will be upon us, and the once-yearly desire to mate will seize our bodies. No mermaid has ever done this with a male before; none of our kind have ever conceived, hatched, or reared offspring. Our very purpose is chastity; the reason for our existence is our sacred virginity, a holy sacrifice to please the will of Atargatis. We are not meant to be bound to men as wives, or beholden to children as mothers.”  
  
Josh could tell, from the way several of the mermaids were listening to the Queen, hanging on her every word, and then turning to look at one another in confusion or realization, that most of this “Goddess” business was entirely news to them.  
  
“Well,” offered Josh, “what if I just, uh, stay out of everyone’s way when the day comes? I’ll be really careful about it, I promise.”  
  
Queen Nephi shook her head and said, “I fear the temptation will be too great. Here in this island sanctuary, my beloved mermaidens have been shielded from all the depredations and wickedness of men; and also the temptation to lose their virtue to men, to see their very maidenhood destroyed.”  
  
Alex cut in and said, “I get the sense that a lot of these girls weren’t even virgins in the first place before they got turned into mermaids.”  
  
“That is of no concern,” said Nephi. “The moment they appeared on my island with their pretty girlish legs and sacred womanly cunts encased within hard, impenetrable scales, and their cores of carnal lust buried deeply for all future time within their powerful fishes’ tails, they became virgins anew, and their maidenhood was restored to them. Every mermaid is a mer- _maiden_ , and must always remain so, lest we risk the displeasure of the Goddess.  
  
“So you must understand, Josh, you who are the first and only merman to ever lay eyes upon the Sacred Refuge: you must never, ever consummate a mating with any mermaid, for as long as you dwell upon this island. If you upset the careful balance I have wrought and bring harm to what my Goddess has bidden me build here, I will destroy you. Do you understand?”  
  
Cowed, Josh answered with a meek nod. “Twenty days from now. I’ll hide myself away. Or stay up on the beach or something. It’ll be like I was never here.” (And in truth, Josh believed that he was being entirely truthful with the queen when he spoke that last part. He knew full well that the month was already halfway gone; that in two weeks’ time, Uncle Jack would summon him and Alex back to the real world. It really would be as if they’d never been there.)  
  
Queen Nephi turned to face the crowd of assembled mermaids and said, “Mark my decree. When the day of mating arrives, none of you may approach the merman. It is the will of the Goddess. Thus have I spoken; thus shall it be.” She turned back to Josh and Alex and said, “On that day, you both will keep company with me and my handmaidens. Oh, and one thing more.” She pointed at the Derceto medallion that Josh had put back around his neck. “If either of you find another amulet like that one, but with the inscription in Hieratic Egyptian, be a dear and bring it to me, would you? Good.”  
  
With that, the Queen dismissed them from her presence, and she went off to mingle and socialize with some of the other centuries-ancient mermaids now lingering in the lagoon.  
  
Josh and Alex shared a concerned look. The Queen, Josh was quite certain, could become dangerous merely by deciding to favor caution and do away with him preemptively. His last two weeks on Mermaid Island might prove perilous. But he took some small comfort from the fact that it wouldn’t be the Queen’s religious zealotry or her imperious decree that would disappoint the mermaids when their mating-day finally arrived. It would be the fact that he and Alex would already be long-gone by then, and nothing more to the mermaids than a mysterious memory. The only question was, could he survive the last fourteen or so days that he had left here?

* * *

The days began to run into each other as Josh enjoyed the latter half of his vacation. Sun, sand, surf, and mermaids—it was _almost_ the best thing ever. He whiled away the hours relaxing on the beaches, swimming, playing, and trying his best to keep his level of sexual tension down to a minimum.  
  
That was, of course, the one downside to being here: his sexual tension could only build and build the longer he remained on this island, and it was even worse for Alex. It was bad enough not having a dick anymore, not being able to jerk off when he felt the urge or to experience any kind of orgasm; at least whenever Josh made love to a mermaid (or a pair of mermaids, or a group of them—there were lots of fishy females around who desired the attentions of the island’s only merman), even if he couldn’t have an orgasm, he could still at least ejaculate and feel some small sense of physical relief. Alex and all of the other mermaids had no such outlet: their lack of a working vagina and clitoris meant that they simply could not climax; and even if there were a rare, lucky mermaid present who in her previous human life had been capable of cumming without genital stimulation as some women can, something about the mermaids’ fishy physiology simply didn’t allow for it now. The mermaids were stuck living lives of constant horniness, with no remedy for it beyond the wholly inadequate palliatives of above-the-waist petting, make-out sessions, and nipple-play.  
  
Now, more than three-and-a-half weeks had passed since Josh and Alex had first arrived on Mermaid Island, and Josh knew that his time here was growing short. One day, while Alex was off in the open ocean somewhere, frolicking in the waves with a ravishingly cute pre-Columbian Ojibwa mer-girl named Menana, he approached Yasmine in the lagoon and asked her to follow him to somewhere more private, so that they could talk.  
  
Josh had decided to tell her the truth about where he and Alex had come from, and also to suggest to her the possibility that she might be able to come back with him when he left. Josh had made this decision because he didn’t think that he could bear to be parted from Yasmine. He had fallen head-over-fins in love with this beautiful, sexy, funny, kind-of-nerdy mermaid who was once a British-educated, Lebanese girl who’d been murdered by pirates in the early 1980s—and thereby frozen outside of time with her legs and pussy trapped deep inside an unfeeling fishtail here on Mermaid Island.  
  
Josh led Yasmine around to the north side of the island, and he beached himself and started to pull his awkward body across the warm sand with his arms. Yasmine did the same, although she had a trickier time of it, since she had to prop up her torso quite a bit higher than the merman did in order to keep her bare boobs from dragging in the sand. Eventually, they arrived at the sand-dunes, and in the shade of a little hill, Josh told Yasmine, “Alex and I aren’t dead.”  
  
She was astonished. “What!?”  
  
What followed then was a veritable exposition-dump and a string of candid confessions. Josh told Yasmine everything about his wizard uncle, his curio shop and study full of magic books, Alex having previously been a boy, and how Uncle Jack had only transported the two of them here to vacation for a month using some kind of magical conjuring-circle and a spell. And at the end of it, after having spilled his guts at a mile-a-minute speaking pace, he concluded by saying, “—And when we have to go back, I want to try and take you with us, because I’m in love with you and I don’t want to leave you here!” Then he gasped for breath and panted while he waited for Yasmine to answer.  
  
Yasmine was stunned and took several seconds to process everything. She had a blank stare on her face; Josh didn’t know what to make of it, and so he could only wince in fearful anticipation and refuse to look her in the eye. “You’re mad, aren’t you? Please don’t be mad, we didn’t want to upset—”  
  
He was cut off when Yasmine suddenly darted forward, hugged him tightly, and kissed him deeply. She moaned into Josh’s mouth and then broke away and said, “Oh, Josh, I love you so much! Of course I want to be with you—especially if you can get me off this bloody island!”  
  
“Then you’ll come with us?”  
  
“Absolutely!” said Yasmine. “Being a mermaid is wonderful and all, and immortality certainly has its benefits, but oh, to be _human_ again! To get my legs back—to get my pussy back—”  
  
“I know exactly what you mean,” said Josh. “Believe me, the first thing I’m going to do when I get my dick back is jack off like there’s no tomorrow and the house is empty.”  
  
“No you won’t,” said Yasmine seriously.  
  
“No?”  
  
She grinned. “Nope. The first thing you’re going to do when you get your dick back is shag me rotten, lover.” She rolled her body onto Josh’s, pressing her breasts into his chest, and kissed him again. The thought of becoming human again had both of them excited, even though the end of the month was still some days away, and Josh’s self-control was hanging by a thread now. So he drew Yasmine to himself and kissed her back fiercely and gave everything he had into making love to her. An hour later, horny and frustrated, they both gave up and collapsed back onto the beach, panting from the exhaustion, tingly all over. Josh clung to his lover tightly; and Yasmine held onto him, tears starting to form in her eyes.  
  
“I can’t believe—after almost forty years—in just a few days’ time, we won’t have to put ourselves through _that_ anymore,” said Yasmine, holding back a sob.  
  
“We’ll figure it out,” Josh said, and he kissed the top of her head. “I won’t let you be left behind. I promise.”  
  
Yasmine cuddled up to him, and they both remained together on that beach for the rest of the evening, until night fell; then they went to sleep right there in each other’s arms.

* * *

It was day thirty on Mermaid Island. Josh, Alex, and Yasmine sat together on the beach near the sand-dunes. Josh had already made sure that the coast was clear and that there were no other mermaids around. He preferred that the mermaids not witness his sudden disappearance, lest it cause an uproar and upset everyone.  
  
All day long, the trio lounged on the beach, with Josh constantly holding Yasmine’s hand or hugging her tightly to his body. He was honestly afraid that he might simply vanish without warning, leaving his beloved behind, and he wasn’t about to allow that.  
  
Josh’s attention was focused completely on Yasmine, and hers on him; but Alex was just _bored_. There really was nothing for her to do, and she frequently headed out into the water to swim around for a bit and thereby break up the monotony of waiting. From time to time, Josh and Yasmine would join her, always with their hands firmly clasped together. Yasmine was eager, positively hyped with anticipation, Josh could tell.  
  
Only, as the evening drew near, all three of them started to grow nervous. When the sun set, Alex suggested that maybe they would all be transported when they fell asleep, and that they’d wake up back in the wizard’s study, their humanity restored to them, the next morning.  
  
But when morning arrived and the trio found themselves still all on the beach together, still with fishtails instead of legs, it was Josh who lamely suggested that maybe Uncle Jack had meant a _thirty-one_ day month.  
  
So they all remained together on the beach for yet _another_ day, waiting to be whisked away back home. When the midday sun started sinking low in the sky, and afternoon arrived, Josh and Alex start shouting aloud, “Uncle Jack! Hey, Uncle Jack!” and “Hey, Dad! Is your stupid wizard-conference over yet!?”

This eventually gave way to cries of, “Okay, Dad, ha-ha, but this isn’t funny anymore!” and “Really, you can bring us home now! Please? Anybody? Can you hear us!? _Uncle Jaaack!!!!_ ”

* * *

The next day, Yasmine was pissed. She believed, perhaps justifiably, that Josh had lied to her. She honestly thought that it had been some kind of sick joke. Just when she had really been starting to accept her fate and actually getting used to the semi-horrific idea of being a mermaid for literal eternity—it had only taken her thirty-seven years to arrive in that place mentally and emotionally—then along had come Josh with his story of false hope, making her believe that escape was possible.  
  
Of course, Josh knew full well that he’d been telling the truth, and Alex backed him up. But regardless, it all devolved into a huge, messy, mean-spirited argument, and in the end, Yasmine shouted that she wanted nothing more to do with either of them, and she crawled off the beach, dove into the ocean, and swam away.  
  
Josh felt all his hope deflate utterly. Alex just looked defeated. After Yasmine had been gone for a while, and the two cousins had shared the beach alone together in uneasy silence, Alex turned to Josh and said, “I don’t want to be stuck here forever. Not like this.”  
  
Josh put an arm around Alex’s shoulders and pulled her into a half-hug. “It’ll be okay. It’s not really all that bad.”  
  
Alex swatted his arm and pushed him away. “No, Josh, I’m fucking serious! I don’t know how much longer I can last like this. If I have to go another month here without any kind of release, I’m just—I’m just gonna freak the fuck out, okay? Crap, maybe I’m already freaking out. What could’ve happened my Dad? Why would he just leave us here? Tell me! Why would he abandon us to this!?”  
  
“Whoa, slow down, Alex. You’re right, you _are_ freaking out. But maybe there’s no reason to worry yet.”  
  
She gritted her teeth and angrily hissed, “ _No. Reason. To. Worry!?_ ” She started swatting at Josh’s arm and tail with half-hearted slaps and cried out, “We’re trapped on a freaky magic island in another dimension! We’ve been turned into fish! Fucking _fish_ , Josh! Fish don’t have any sex organs, at least not the fun kind! And, oh, yeah, in five or six more days, all the goddamn mermaids around here are going to start _filling the whole goddamn ocean with their eggs_! Which—if you’ll recall—you are not allowed to go near, or else the fucking Queen of the Mermaids is going to fucking **_murder you_**!”  
  
“Okay, yeah, that’s bad,” Josh admitted. “But you said it yourself. We’re in another dimension. Maybe time is just flowing differently here. You know, kind of like a Narnia, wardrobe type situation?” He looked at Alex hopefully.  
  
She stared at Josh and then shouted, “ _Don’t say things like that!_ Do you even remember how that story goes!? Those kids _grew up_ in Narnia after living their _whole freaking lives_ there!” Alex then screamed out a wordless yell of anger and frustration, and she spun over onto her belly, plopped down onto the sand, and buried her head in her folded arms to cry.  
  
Josh didn’t know what to do or say to comfort her. He just patted Alex on the back and stayed with her. All he could do now was wait, he figured: wait, and hope that they wouldn’t be trapped on this island for too much longer, or that Uncle Jack was working on a way to rescue the both of them.  
  
But there was something else that Alex had mentioned, and it had Josh really worried now. The mermaids’ egg-laying season was coming, and it was only a few short days away.  
  
One wrong move from his randy, scaly ass, and it would be Josh’s head on the chopping-block.  
  
_Maybe it’s a good thing after all,_ he thought glumly, _that Yasmine hates my guts now._


	5. Chapter 5

The next morning, Josh woke up on the beach. Alex was still there, sleeping, a few feet away from him. Normally affectionate (maybe rather more affection than a cousin ought to be), last night she had kept her distance. Her bikini-top and pirate-jewels sat in a small pile on the sand next to her, and she seemed to be resting peacefully. So, Josh decided to take it upon himself to swim out and catch the two of them some breakfast before they started their day.  
  
He came back to the beach half an hour later dragging with him some huge, slow-moving, colorful tropical fish to kill and butcher. Alex was already awake when he arrived: she had been sitting on the sand, hugging her tail to her chest like a pair of legs bent at the knee, staring out at the waves, and thinking.  
  
Josh had been doing some thinking too, and he said to Alex, “I’m not ready to give up yet.”  
  
“What do you mean?”  
  
“Well, think about it. All these mermaids, trapped here, transformed with magic. The Queen knows something about it that she isn’t telling anyone, and I’ll just bet that if we can figure out what it is, we can beat her and escape. Help _everyone_ escape.”  
  
Alex was skeptical. “You want to do the Scooby thing?”  
  
“I always did want to be a hero. Will you help me?”  
  
Alex nodded. Over breakfast, the two of them discussed their plans. “One of us should try and get close to the Queen,” Alex suggested. “You know, try and _pump_ her for information.” With zero subtlety, she accompanied the word “pump” with a suggestive thrust of her fish-hips.  
  
“Well, she’s expecting us to spend egg-day all alone with her and her cronies,” Josh pointed out. “In the meanwhile… I don’t know. I’m just getting a weird vibe, like there’s something we’ve been missing.”  
  
“A vibe?” asked Alex. “It’s been a while since you had one of those.”  
  
“Yeah,” said Josh. “But then, it’s been a while since the two of us have gotten into real trouble together.”  
  
“So, what’re you thinking?” asked Alex. She scooted her fish-butt across the sand and sat closer to her cousin, now intrigued.  
  
“Something the Queen said. About how this island is consecrated ground. And about that ‘holy relic’ of hers that she lost. I don’t know why, but I’m just feeling like… they’re connected somehow. Call it a hunch.”  
  
“All right, then… let’s search the island,” Alex suggested. “We haven’t really had a reason to do that yet, but maybe now we should go and see if there’s anything inland.”  
  
“And if that doesn’t turn up anything, we can always dig around the beaches for buried treasure,” said Josh with a chuckle.  
  
“God, I hope not,” said Alex. “This island isn’t very big, but it’s got a metric fuck-ton of beach to it.”

* * *

Once breakfast was done, Josh and Alex decided that sand-dunes would be easier to cope with than jungle or cliffs or caves, and so they set out from the beach they were on, dragging themselves with their arms and pulling their tails behind them as they slowly crawled and struggled their way inland. When the sand gave way to cutting beach-grass, they found that they had to pick their way carefully: the sharp stalks couldn’t cut their scales, but they could do a number on bare skin. Alex, in particular, was now _really_ grateful for the bikini-top that she had found in the shipwreck.  
  
It was a real challenge for the two merpeople to pull themselves over the dry land by their arms, and the exertion tired them both out pretty quickly. They had to take frequent rest-breaks before they could press on; but Josh reasoned that it could have much worse. “For whatever reason,” he said to Alex, “these bodies still seem adapted to dry land just fine. We don’t have gills, and we don’t seem to dry out if we sleep on the beach all night long. Mermaids aren’t always portrayed that way in stories, you know.”  
  
“No, they aren’t,” agreed Alex. “But it does kind of make sense, if you think about it: a mermaid is half-fish, half-human. Fifty-fifty. Not seventy-thirty, or mostly fish, a little bit human. Sea and land, water and air, in equal measure.”  
  
“Huh.” Josh thought for a moment. “Or maybe it’s like this: humans can breathe air, and walk, and swim, but we can’t breathe water. So maybe it’s only fair that merpeople can also do three of those but not the other one: breathe air, breathe water, and swim, but not walk.”  
  
“You’re a goofball,” commented Alex.  
  
The minutes dragged on into hours, and the “not being able to walk” was definitely starting to take its toll. They crawled their way back and forth across the dunes, dragging themselves inch by tiring inch up the hills, and then rolling or sliding down them on the other side (and catching little cuts and scrapes from the beach-grass as they descended). They were both beat up and exhausted when they finally discovered an oddly-shaped sand dune with a large depression or crater in the top of it, all of the island flora cleared away, and a little stone shrine and altar decorated with a coral-and-seashell motif. Standing over the altar was a stone statue, an idol of a twin-tailed mermaid holding her two fish-tails in either hand, exposing her stone vulva to the altar-top. “Look at that,” said Alex. “A Sheela-Na-Gig.”  
  
“Another mermaid mythology thing?” Josh asked.  
  
“Ancient Celtic water spirit,” said Alex.  
  
“Of course it is.” Josh pulled himself up to the altar and looked around. There were lots of offering-goods strewn about here: small carved bits of coral jewelry, little stone and driftwood idols and figurines, and a silver amulet. He got an eerie sense of foreboding as he picked up the amulet. There was an image of Atargatis on the face of it, and a column of hieroglyphics in a cartouche.  
  
Alex peered over Josh’s shoulder and read, “‘Atargatis’! Josh, this is it! This is the Queen’s relic!”  
  
“I wonder what it does,” Josh said quietly to himself. Then, on a whim, he took off the Derceto amulet, left that on the shrine, and donned the Atargatis amulet in its stead.  
  
“Well?” prompted Alex. “Do you feel anything happening?”  
  
Josh waited for a bit, and then he shook his head. “Nope.”  
  
“Well there’s got to be _some_ magic to it,” said Alex. “Or some reason the Queen wants it back so badly.”  
  
“I guess we’ll find out eventually, one way or another,” Josh said.  
  
With nothing more to do at the shrine, they both turned back to the dunes, ready for the long, painful, tiresome crawl back down to the sea.

* * *

Josh and Alex spent the following day on a futile attempt to search the jungles; but after hours and hours, they didn’t find anything interesting, except for some coconuts and bananas, both of which were foods that the two cousins hadn’t tasted in weeks.  
  
The day after that, they searched along the sea-cliffs, but they didn’t find any caves or openings, either under the water or above, except for the one that they already knew about but hadn’t explored yet, behind the waterfall in the lagoon. So, they decided to head over to the lagoon and see what there was to see. Plus, Josh hadn’t interacted with any of the other mermaids since Yasmine had left, and he and Alex both were starting to feel a little lonely quite in spite of each other’s company.  
  
With three days left until the mermaids were to experience their egg-time, they returned to the lovely lagoon, with its sea-lilies and rock-pools and natural waterfalls.  
  
When Josh and Alex arrived at the lagoon, there were several mermaids present, most of whom they had already met (and whom one or both of them had previously made love to). Being the only merman around, Josh was instantly mobbed by a bevy of eager mer-girls, the very instant they noticed his arrival, and Alex was once again made to feel more than a little jealous of the attention he always got from them. But Josh only had eyes for one mermaid: he could see Yasmine hanging out under the waterfall with Sally, trying to hide behind her girlfriend and make herself appear very small and invisible.  
  
Josh politely excused himself from his many admirers, and Alex ran interference for him, plenty happy to draw these bawdy mermaids’ attentions away from her cousin and take them off his hands for a time. While Alex made herself the center of attention and cranked up her flirting skills to maximum, Josh swam across the lagoon and made his way over to where Yasmine was sitting.  
  
Before he could reach the waterfall, there was a small splash, and Sally floated in his way. “Nuh-uh; don’t even think about it, fish-boy,” she said. “Yaz told me what you did to her! She is _not_ ready to forgive you, and I’m not gonna _let_ her forgive you anytime soon. You fucking asshole.”  
  
Josh tried to argue. “I was telling the—” _Wait,_ he realized. _There’s no point in arguing with Sally when Yasmine is right here_. He looked past Sally’s shoulder and said to Yasmine: “I was telling the truth! Every word! Only now, me and Alex are stuck here with you, same as all the other mermaids!”  
  
Sally said, “Fuh. Sounds like you both just broke Rule Number Two, and after we warned you not to: you’re dead. You’re a fish. And you’re never gonna leave here or ever be human again. Accept it, or you’re just in denial and makin’ yourself and all the rest of us miserable.” She folded her arms over her generous bust and glared at Josh.  
  
Josh swam around Sally and looked up at Yasmine, perched on her rock, her eyes cast down to her tail. She idly splashed at the water with her flukes, but she didn’t look up while Josh spoke to her. “Please,” he said earnestly. “I don’t want us to be apart like this. Please, just let me apologize.”  
  
Yasmine still said nothing. Then, after a moment, she slid down off the rock to join Josh in the water, flitted up to him, and looked him in the eye. She said quietly: “I suppose… it’s only fair to make some allowances. I’ve been here for decades, and it’s only been weeks for you. Being turned into a mermaid… it was a lot to take in. And I’d be lying if I said that I dealt with it gracefully.”  
  
Sally shook her head and said, “Hm-mm, girl, you are _not_ just going to take him back like that!”  
  
“Oh, yes I am!” Yasmine snapped. All of a sudden, she threw her arms around Josh and planted a quick kiss on his lips.  
  
“Just like that?” asked Josh, embracing her.  
  
“Just like that,” answered Yasmine. Then she leaned in very close and whispered into his ear, “You’re still _mine_. I’m not going to let some other siren hussy sink her hooks into you.”  
  
Sally made a chiding “ _tsk-tsk_ ” noise and said to Yasmine, “Girl, you’re crazy. And you, mister merman, you’re still an asshole.”  
  
Josh splashed some water at Sally’s face. “I don’t think any of us even _have_ an asshole.” (Which may have been technically true, Josh figured. The merfolk did possess an anal vent of sorts, on the front of their tails, further down than their genital-slits. It too lacked sensation and wasn’t any fun to play with.)  
  
“Oh, what- _ever_ ,” Sally scoffed. Then she turned around, wiggled her butt in the air as she flipped her fin to dive underwater, and went off to join Alex and the rest of the flirting mermaids in the lagoon.  
  
Yasmine touched Josh’s cheek and turned his head to face her. Then she kissed him, deeply and passionately. In short order, the two of them were sinking together down to the lagoon floor, wrapped in a tight embrace and exchanging heated kisses. Josh wanted to take it slowly and just enjoy being with his girlfriend again, but it had been a couple of days now, and he had really missed her.  
  
So it was little wonder that he couldn’t help himself: he immediately went for her luscious boobs, groping her mounds, teasing the nipples until they were as hard as pebbles under his fingertips and thumbs. He bent down and took one into his mouth, playing at the areola with his lips and flicking the hard little nipple with his tongue. Yasmine gasped and let out a mouthful of bubbles that rose to the surface. Several minutes of this love-play went by, and her frantic gasps of “Don’t stop, don’t stop,” and her clinging to Josh’s head by the hair eventually gave way to frustrated cries of “Stop—okay, stop now,” and soft scratches across his back, when she at last couldn’t take it anymore.  
  
Josh released his mermaid lover, and she gazed at him lovingly, her face flushed with agonizing arousal and unresolved sexual tension. Then she smiled wickedly and attacked his chest in much the same way that he had gone after hers. He knew that at the frenzied pace Yasmine was taking, he wouldn’t be able to stand this for very long. He could already tell that after a short few minutes, he too would be at his limit and begging for his beloved to stop.  
  
Only, this time, it was different. This time, it didn’t happen that way. When Yasmine started in on teasing and kissing Josh’s nipples, he had been resolved to just lean back and enjoy the sensations for as long as he could stand them, in spite of the fact that he knew he couldn’t cum. But, instead of reaching that familiar, frustrating brink where his nipples became overly sensitive and his need for Yasmine to quit became overwhelming, this time around, he was driven up to that edge and found that his body was riding it—and riding it—and riding it—and it stayed there for minute after minute.  
  
After ten minutes, Yasmine was giving Josh questioning looks, but he just looked down and met her eyes. (Josh thought that Yasmine looked so incredibly fucking sexy with her big brown eyes lifted up to meet his while she kissed his chest and tongued at one of his nips.) He smiled and gave her an encouraging nod, and so she shrugged and kept on going. After about fifteen minutes, her lips and tongue were actually starting to feel numb, but Josh was breathing heavily and whispering to Yasmine, “Oh God—Oh God—don’t stop—don’t—yes—keep that up—yeah, just like—hrrrk— _ooooooh yeeeaaaah_!”  
  
Yasmine was even more astonished than Josh was when he suddenly _came_ , from nipple-play alone, shooting his fish-milt out of his genital vent. Like a round from a paint-ball gun, it splattered all over her stomach; and even under water, the stuff was sticky enough that it clung there. Yasmine just stared down at the mess of fluid coating her human belly, luxuriating in its warmth and wondering at what had just happened.  
  
Josh’s breathing started to become regular again, and he heaved out, “Holy… mother of… that was… that was a real… what the hell got into you, Yaz?”  
  
“Into me!?” she retorted. “What got into you!? That’s not supposed to be—I mean, it shouldn’t even be possible!”  
  
“Maybe it really is different for mermen,” he speculated. “Maybe, if the conditions are just right…”  
  
“If so, that makes you the luckiest bastard in the universe,” said Yasmine. She moved down along Josh’s body, peppering cute little kisses across his chest and stomach as she went, until she crossed the line from skin to belly-scales and took a good, close look at his tiny fish-slit. There was still a bit of white fluid clinging there, and Josh could feel the muscles around the vent still quivering from the aftershocks of his first orgasm in well over five weeks—and apparently, he just then realized, the first and only orgasm _ever_ experienced by any merperson.  
  
Yasmine kissed Josh’s slit, and he gasped. It felt _really_ good. “Oh, baby… if you do that a few more times, I might just—”  
  
His words were cut off when Yasmine kissed the scales outside of his slit and tongued at the slightly-gaping opening. “You know,” she said to him in between lewd licks, “Even without being able to come, making love as a mermaid is still enjoyable. The lack of release is frustrating, but we all still keep on doing it anyway. Because we love how it makes us feel.”  
  
She dipped her tongue as deeply into Josh as it would go (mere millimeters only—his vent was _not_ by any means an organ designed to be penetrated by anything), and he shuddered and quivered and gasped out another fevered cry of, “Oh God!”  
  
“But you know,” she went on, while at the same time continuing to give Josh head ( _Vent-ilingus?_ the odd term crossed his mind), “I’ve realized that I also really miss giving pleasure. Making a man squirm. Just… going down on a guy and sucking his cock.” She increased the pace of her tongue on the merman’s slit, and he felt another contraction of muscles within himself, and a second burst of semen shot out into the water, this time catching Yasmine quite unexpectedly in the face.  
  
“All right, just _what_ in the hell is going _on_ here?” she exclaimed.  
  
Josh stared at Yasmine’s unexpected facial, and she stared back at him while wiping the jizz off and pulling globules of the stuff out of her hair. Then he noticed something else that was out of the ordinary, and a thought suddenly occurred to him.  
  
“Wait just a goddamn minute,” he said. He took off the Atargatis amulet that he had found at the shrine with Alex, and he gazed at the weirdly compelling object as he held it in his hand. Then he placed it around Yasmine’s neck. She didn’t know quite what to make of that, but she didn’t resist when Josh started kissing her and pleasuring her again, much as he had been doing a short while earlier.

* * *

Yasmine’s cries of unrestrained pleasure were loud enough to get the attention of the whole lagoon. By the time the other mermaids arrived to investigate, Yasmine was quivering in Josh’s arms, her tail drooping and all of her muscles reduced to jelly from the chain of multiple, full-body orgasms that he had just induced within her from kissing at her boobs and playing with her egg-slit. Yasmine finally opened her eyes, still glazed and half-lidded from the volcano of pleasure that had just erupted from her breasts and her loins, and she gazed at her partner and said, “That was amazing, my love. You’re incredible. Best I’ve had in forty years.”  
  
Sally and Alex swam up to the two of them, and Alex asked, “What just happened?”  
  
Sally gawked at Josh and Yasmine. “If I didn’t know any better,” she said, “I’d think you just rocked her world!”  
  
Josh took the amulet off of Yasmine’s neck and passed it over to Alex. “Actually, I think we found a magic sex charm.”  
  
Alex went wide-eyed and peered closely at the amulet. “A sex charm!?”  
  
Josh nodded. “I was able to come while wearing it. Then I put it on Yaz, and so was she.”  
  
Alex looked up at Josh, pleading with her eyes.  
  
“Go on, take it for a while,” he told her. “You could really use a good lay.”  
  
Alex didn’t say another word. She just put on the amulet, grabbed Sally by the hand, and swam over to where Liesl was gossiping about this scandalous new development with Xiuying and Fiona. She led all four of them out towards the center of the lagoon; and as she swam away, Josh could her hear giving orders: “Someone find Menana and Nyah. And also Sakura, Bianca, and Jane. It’s time for us to have some real fucking _fun_!”  
  
Once all of the other mermaids were gone, and Josh was once again alone with Yasmine, he cuddled up to her. They held each other close and drifted down to the bottom of the lagoon together, both now sated and content.  
  
“Word of that magical item is going to spread like—like a wildfire,” said Yasmine. “It will be hard for everyone to share.”  
  
“We’ll make it work,” said Josh, kissing Yaz on the forehead. He lay back on the sea-floor sand. Now it suddenly felt like being here and living as a merman wasn’t such a raw deal after all. Even if all the mermaids on the island had to take their turn with the amulet, it would come back around to him and Yasmine eventually. And in the meanwhile, it wasn’t as if Josh and his girlfriend couldn’t make love at all—like Yasmine had said earlier, even without release, the sex-play was still enjoyable, and they would keep doing it anyway because it still made them feel good.


	6. Chapter 6

The Queen of Mermaid Island arrived in the lagoon, accompanied as she always was by her two handmaidens, Thetis and Miriam, who had been a Greek priestess and a Phoenician trader’s daughter in their long-ago-forgotten human lives, roughly three-thousand years ago. The two mermaid handmaidens were hardly aware now that they had ever once been women; their lot in life for countless unchanging years had been to serve their eternally-beautiful, immortal mermaid-queen, and they had served her faithfully and lovingly. In return, Queen Nephi had favored her maidens, and had cherished and honored them above all the other mermaids in her realm.  
  
Once, long ago, the Queen had possessed a holy relic, a gift from her Goddess, the divine mermaid, Atargatis. This relic was a special amulet, a holy symbol, which, when worn about the neck, had allowed Queen Nephi—or any mermaid to whom the Queen deigned fit to lend the relic—to experience the pleasures of the flesh almost as readily as if she were a real woman again. But the Queen knew that the shape of a mermaid was a gift from Atargatis, and the price for wearing that divine form was an eternity of chastity—a sacrifice of her ability to fully feel the carnal pleasures. Only the high priestess of the Goddess, Queen Nephi herself, was exempt from this stricture, which was why she had been given the amulet—so that _she_ would not be bound and constrained as all the other mermaids were. But the powers of the amulet had been meant for the Queen alone, and even though she _could_ share them if she so desired, her Goddess’s commandment had forbidden her from doing so. To that end, she had mostly kept the amulet to herself, and had kept its powers and it purpose a closely-hidden secret.  
  
But the millennia were long, and Nephi had eventually come to love her two closest friends more than dearly. And so it came to pass that she committed a sin against her Goddess, just once, countless centuries ago. In the height of a lustful passion, she had lent to Thetis and then to Miriam her amulet, so that they too could experience female climax once again, in spite of the inherent limitations on their graceful and exquisitely beautiful mermaid forms.  
  
It had been so long ago that these three mermaids had last shuddered together in mutual orgasmic bliss that mortal men now counted the years of that era backwards and labeled them with “B.C.”  
  
After the consummation of their love, Queen Nephi knew that she and her handmaidens had sinned gravely, and that in order to remain in the favor of the Goddess, she herself would have to share in the mermaids’ sacrifice. And so she had cast away her precious gift, the amulet that exempted her as high priestess from the commandment of Atargatis that mermaids must always be chaste and never experience orgasm. The amulet had been lost to her, and she had imagined that that was the end of it.  
  
Until, inevitably, she began to regret its loss.  
  
Down through the centuries, she searched and she searched, everywhere she could think to look, on and around and even deep within the island. Yes, many times she had even searched the dry land above the island, but she had never found it. (How it had come to be at the shrine in the sand-dunes, out in the open and easily found, just in time for Josh and Alex to appear and lay claim to it, was perhaps a mystery that will forevermore go unsolved.) But since even the Queen herself, by the command of the Goddess, was unable to depart the bounds of her little island realm without perishing in fire, the fact that she never again found the amulet despite centuries of looking had led Nephi to conclude that it truly was lost to her for all time. Perhaps it had been taken back by Atargatis, she imagined, so that the Queen could never again be tempted to err, nor could she ever tempt another mermaid into breaking their Goddess’s most sacred taboo.  
  
So one can only imagine Queen Nephi’s surprise when she swam into the lagoon on the present day. She had expected to see mermaids lounging on the rocks and frolicking in the waters and, yes, cavorting together in a futile imitation of human intercourse. It was of no consequence if the mermaids attempted to engage in such wanton acts of lewdness; in the eyes of the Goddess, their inability to experience the culmination of their lovemaking was what kept them virginal and pure. But this—what the Queen was seeing now—this was _not_ sacred virginal purity. This was the _opposite_ of that. Mermaids—her precious, chaste, involuntarily celibate mermaids—were writhing together in a vast orgy of human breasts and fishy fins, moaning like harlots and—and—and—making each other _come_.  
  
Had she miscounted the days until the egg-time? Had the spring mating season perhaps arrived a little bit early? But, no, that would not explain this—this scandal. This effrontery. This sacrilege. Because even during their egg-time, mermaids never acted in such wanton and whorish fashion. Queen Nephi could barely bring herself to look at this ludicrous display.  
  
But look she did, and around one of the mermaid’s necks—Impossible!—there she spied hanging the Queen’s own sacred relic. The particular mermaid—the newcomer, the Queen recalled, the blonde with the red-orange tail called Alex—was squirming and gasping, writhing and wriggling, crying out in a state of total bliss. Two other mermaids were each suckling at one of Alex’s breasts, and yet a third was stimulating her egg-hole, and she was riding a wave of body-rocking orgasms that crashed down one after another.  
  
After Alex finished getting off—how many times had it been now? She didn’t care, she’d lost count, which was _awesome_ —she passed the amulet onto the next mermaid in line, Sally, who was definitely ready for her third go-around of the day.  
  
Only, that was when Nephi made her presence known, and all of the mermaids had to stop what they were doing.  
  
Nephi swam forward, held out her hand, and demanded her amulet. The other mermaids were reluctant to obey their Queen; they didn’t want to give this thing up. She reminded them that their Goddess _demands_ that they must be maidens and not women, for to be a mermaid and to be protected from the world of men is also to remain pure, their carnal urges buried and unquenched for all time. But the mermaids disagreed; they wanted to be women again, and they said so, sometimes with strong words that made Nephi very angry. The Black American girl from the 1930s had some particularly vulgar things to say, and the newcomer, Alex, protested loudly and angrily.  
  
And so Queen Nephi resorted to another gift of her Goddess, a different gift. Instead of merely implying her command, or even stating it outright, she _sang_ it.  
  
The Mermaid Queen sang, and the mermaids obeyed. They hovered placidly in the water and didn’t interfere while Sally, although she tried to fight it, became compelled to remove the amulet. She passed the relic to Alex, who also pitted her will against Nephi’s song; but, try as she might, she could not win. She gave in and returned the sacred amulet to the Queen.  
  
At once, the Queen donned her holy symbol, and she felt a shudder of satisfaction pass through her body and gather in her loins.  
  
Her Goddess had forgiven her. Atargatis had returned to her high priestess her rightful reward and badge of office. And in three days’ time, when the spring mating-drive caused all of the mermaids to lay their eggs in the sea—eggs which must, by the commandment of Atargatis, never become fertile and bear fruit by the action of a male—Nephi alone would feel the womanly joy of sexual climax, as her body expelled its eggs and her two beloved handmaidens worshiped her breasts with their dexterous tongues.  
  
Confident that she had won the day, Queen Nephi departed the lagoon, taking Thetis and Miriam with her. All of the other mermaids were left there, angered and confused, wondering at the audacity and the unfairness of all that had just transpired.  
  
How dare the Queen take their newly-regained womanhood away from them again? How dare the Queen hoard such a thing to herself, and then, with the same breath, demand that others obey her Goddess while she herself is exempt? It was the height, the very definition, of religious hypocrisy!  
  
Most of the mermaids there contemplated rebellion. Revolution. But they also felt fear: fear that any disobedience would be met with swift punishment, enforced by the power of the Queen’s unbeatable siren-song. With no way to resist that enchantment, the mermaids were already defeated before a rebellion could even begin.  
  
Alex, though, didn’t bother considering open rebellion. She stood apart from the other mermaids. She had an idea—and to see it through, she needed her cousin’s help.

* * *

Josh was flabbergasted. “She did what!?” he exclaimed.  
  
“The Queen took the amulet back,” said Alex. Then she quickly recounted the tale of Nephi’s siren-song, and Alex’s own compulsion to obey. “It felt… it’s hard to explain, but I could feel the need to obey the Queen coming from somewhere down in my _tail_! Like, the very fact of my being a mermaid was the reason I had to do what she said.”  
  
“Well that’s fucking creepy,” Josh commented.  
  
“It’s one of Queen Nephi’s many magical powers that she has over us,” said Yasmine. “We cannot possibly hope to oppose her directly!”  
  
“So I guess that leaves Plan B, then,” said Josh. “Wait until we can get close to Her Majesty and then seduce her and grab the amulet.”  
  
“Yes, that sounds like a plan!” agreed Yasmine. “Take it back from her after she’s done _really_ enjoying herself thanks to its power. That would be some delicious irony!”  
  
“Yeah, we could do that,” said Alex. “But how long would it last? The Queen could just sing her song again and take the relic right back. No; we need a different plan.”  
  
“Well, I’m fresh out of ideas,” said Josh.  
  
“Not quite,” said Alex. “There’s still the rest of Plan A.” She nodded her head towards the waterfall.  
  
“What, the cave?” asked Josh. “Do you really think we’ll find something in there?”  
  
“Think?” said Alex. “No, not exactly. It’s… more of a vibe.”  
  
“Now _you’re_ getting hunches?”  
  
Alex nodded enthusiastically (which made her bare tits jiggle enticingly—Josh only noticed just now that Alex hadn’t bothered to retrieve her bikini-top, although she was still wearing most of her pirate-jewels). “I know all about wizard shit, remember? I had that amulet on long enough to get a really good sense of what its magic feels like, and I’m feeling a huge pull just exactly like it, coming from that cave!”  
  
Josh turned to Yasmine and asked, “Do any mermaids ever go into the cave behind the waterfall?”  
  
Yasmine scoffed, as if the very notion were ridiculous. “No, of course not! It’s just a dark, scary tunnel. Why would any of us ever want to go in there?”  
  
“Well we’ve got to try it now,” said Josh. “Come on, ladies. Let’s go do the Indiana Jones thing.”

* * *

The cave-mouth behind the waterfall very quickly narrowed down into a tunnel. It was really just a lava-tube, flooded with seawater now, but once part of a network of such tunnels that probably crisscrossed their way all throughout the innards of this volcanic tropical island. It was completely dark, and the merpeople had no means to light their way, so Josh and Alex and Yasmine were compelled to hold hands and _feel_ their way through the tunnel. They had to grope at the rocky walls and make sure that they constantly talked to each other, so that they wouldn’t lose one or both of their companions in the dark.  
  
As they followed the tunnel, Alex explained, “It’s the volcano. It has to be.”  
  
“What about the volcano?” Josh asked.  
  
“Well,” said Alex, “it’s _pointy_.” As if that somehow explained everything.  
  
“Go on.”  
  
“Okay, so you know how wizards and witches wear pointy hats?” said Alex.  
  
“Uh-huh.”  
  
“And how New Agey weirdos believe in crystals and ‘pyramid power’?”  
  
“Uh-huh.”  
  
“Well, there you have it!” said Alex. “Volcanoes are full of igneous crystal, and they’re like big, natural cones or pyramids! They’re the perfect shape if you want to make some kind of magical beacon for drawing in and focusing psychic energy!”  
  
After a quiet beat, Josh answered, “Uh-huh.” He sounded skeptical.  
  
“Ooh!—just you wait until we get to the end of this tunnel!” Alex exclaimed. “You’ll see, my hunch is right!”  
  
“But, what exactly _is_ your hunch?” asked Yasmine. “How could the Queen be ‘using’ a volcano?”  
  
“We’ll know when we get to wherever it is that we’re going!” snaped Alex—which rather definitively ended that conversation.  
  
While the tunnel continued to be flooded with seawater, Josh chatted with the girls and made small-talk, keeping the conversation to lighter topics. But then, suddenly, the tunnel slanted sharply upward, and the three merpeople all breached the surface of the water. The tunnel continued onward, up and up, in dry air.  
  
They realized to their dismay that if they wanted to go on, they would all three have to crawl and climb over bare rock, with only their arms to pull them forward. Their fishtails would be as useless in this tunnel as they had been on the beaches and dunes, and at times they might perhaps prove to be even more of a hindrance, if the slope of the tunnel should ever grow too steep.  
  
Josh started to give voice to these concerns, but Alex just told him to quit being a baby, and she started pulling her body up the tunnel, groping and feeling her way blindly in the dark. Josh and Yasmine followed behind, and it was a mercifully short time later when Alex announced that she was seeing a light up ahead. This seemed to renew everyone’s hope and drive, and it gave them all a second wind. The trio took heart; very soon, the two mermaids and the merman were quickly crawling and slithering and fish-flopping their way up the tunnel and out into the sunlit cavern ahead.  
  
 _Cavern_ was perhaps not quite the right word, for they now found themselves within the caldera of the island’s dormant volcano; Josh and Alex were both quite sure of that. The rocky walls around them tapered up to a relatively small hole in the cavern-ceiling, where they could see blue skies, and sunlight streamed down from overhead.  
  
In fact, the sunlight formed a conical sunbeam that shone down onto a single object in the very center of the cavern: a low pedestal of rough black obsidian, upon which sat a glowing crystal, the color of aquamarine. “This is it!” said Alex. “This is the focus!” She eagerly pulled herself forward across the floor of the caldera, and Josh and Yasmine followed closely behind.  
  
“So, what exactly does it do?” asked Josh.  
  
Alex didn’t answer. She gazed at the glowing crystal in growing fascination. Her expression became blank and her eyes glassy: she was enraptured, and she couldn’t help but reach out and take the object into her hands.  
  
The very instant that Alex touched the crystal, Josh felt himself getting… _aroused_. Just a bit. Yasmine likewise felt a growing heat in her breasts and a sudden increase in the flow of egg-lubricating mucus to her fish-genitalia. And as for Alex, she experienced rather more than a bit of mild sexual excitement. She moaned and straight-up lost control, setting the crystal down again and throwing herself at Josh. He protested, “Al—mmph,” in futility, as she threw her arms around him, kissed him open-mouthed, lightly and playfully bit at his lip, and teased at one of his nipples with a forefinger.  
  
Yasmine tried to interject; and as she spoke, she reached out to pick up the crystal that Alex had discarded. “Josh, isn’t Alex your cousin? Anyway, maybe this isn’t the best time to be getting—” But all rational thoughts left her mind the moment her hands made contact with the artifact, and she too quickly pushed herself onto Josh and joined in next to Alex.  
  
 _Great_ , Josh thought to himself, _now I’m being accosted by two horny mermaids, one of whom is my girlfriend and the other I definitely do **not** want to be doing this with—oh, God, that feels **really** good—  
_  
When Yasmine brushed Josh’s sperm-vent with a light touch of her hand, his tail snaped out, and his flipper happened to graze the crystal. Suddenly, his mind was positively flooded with lust—and with thousands and thousands of images of horny, writhing mermaids trying in utter futility to make love to each other down through the centuries, always trying but never quite managing to drive one another to orgasm.  
  
Josh couldn’t help it. He lost control and gave in.

* * *

Being in the presence of this weird crystal artifact was a lot like wearing the Mermaid Queen’s amulet, but with the effects magnified tenfold. It took quite some time before Josh and Yasmine and Alex were all at last too exhausted to keep having sex with each other; but it did eventually happen. Josh mused that if there was a small bit of solace he could take from this experience, it was the fact that he and the girls had all at least been able to get each other off several times—which was pretty great, even if he had been managing to resist the urge to touch Alex all these weeks, only to finally fail now.  
  
“Let us never speak of this to anyone,” said Josh. He and Alex and Yasmine were all tangled up together, a heap of arms and fishtails, breathing heavily and basking in afterglow. His merman-cum was _everywhere_ —all three of their tails were positively coated in it.  
  
“Whatever you say, cuz,” said Alex. “But I was _right_.” She disentangled herself and picked up the crystal again. Josh and Yasmine both moved to stop her, but she just held the glowing stone away from their reach and brushed them both off. “Relax! We won’t lose control again. Not now.”  
  
“Why not?” asked Josh. “What even _was_ that, that just happened, just now? What the hell _is_ that thing?”  
  
“It’s a… a phylactery,” said Alex. “A receptacle. A vessel for drawing in and containing all of the island’s psycho-sexual energy.”  
  
“Psychic sex magic?” echoed Yasmine.  
  
“Pretty much,” said Alex. “See, I have a theory here. I think that mermaids can get it on just fine. That if it weren’t for that bitchy Queen, we could finger-fuck, tail-shag, fish-bone, and fin-bang each other all day long for the rest of ever, and it would be fucking _glorious_. But instead, the Queen and her dumb cunt of a Goddess put this magic rock here to siphon away all of our sex-energy and make it so that we can’t come unless we’re wearing some stupid special amulet that makes us immune to the rock’s effects.”  
  
“You think that the Queen’s amulet doesn’t have any real power of its own?” said Josh. “That it’s just blocking what _this_ stone does?”  
  
“That’s sure what it feels like,” said Alex. “Can’t you sense how strongly this rock pulls on the ley-lines in the local mana-field?”  
  
“Uh, no,” replied Josh. “No, I cannot.”  
  
“You’d make a shit wizard, cousin.”  
  
Yasmine giggled at Alex’s comment and then asked, “So what do we do about it? How do we fix this?”  
  
“Only one way,” said Alex. And before either of her companions could react, she dashed the stone onto the cave-floor and shattered it into a million pieces.


	7. Chapter 7

The instant Alex shattered the crystal, she orgasmed, and powerfully. Josh and Yasmine were both sitting approximately half a meter away from Alex, when a wave of green light from within the crystal’s broken innards washed over them. Given that light travels through space at something like three-hundred million meters per second, it only took about one-and-a-half nanoseconds before they too were writhing on the ground, Yasmine making a beautiful o-face as she suddenly climaxed, and Josh making another sticky white mess all down the front of his fishtail as he uncontrollably spooged all over himself.

* * *

Elsewhere, all across Mermaid Island, from the beaches and tide-pools, to the lagoon and the shallows, to the reefs and shoals, and all the way out to the open waters, the aqua-colored light washed over everything. And every mermaid it touched suddenly felt every orgasm that she had ever been denied down through the centuries, all at once. For some of these mermaids, who had been here for many centuries, it was a stellar core of an orgasm; a nuclear explosion of pleasure; a quark-gluon plasma of intense, body-quaking sensations. For some of these mermaids, their hearts literally seized up and stopped beating for minutes at a time, only for their immortality to reassert itself and revive them a short while later.  
  
All except for the Queen. Thetis and Miriam were both astonished and horrified when Nephi’s amulet suddenly caught fire while all three mermaids were together and making love under the water. The Queen shrieked in agony as she burned up from the inside out, and her handmaidens could do nothing but watch this happen and pull themselves away in disgust and abject fear.

* * *

Josh and Alex and Yasmine all emerged from the cave and passed through the waterfall, swimming together hand-in-hand, where they then surfaced in the lagoon. There were mermaids everywhere—possibly the whole colony, the entire population of Mermaid Island. They sat on the rocks, they swam among the sea-lilies, and they crowded the waters of the lagoon itself. They all looked _very_ satisfied—tired, but satisfied. And when the trio appeared, the rest of the mermaids all cheered and applauded, for they all had some idea that these three had done something marvelous to change them and to change their lives forever.  
  
Some of the mermaids started making love to each other, while others crowded around the three heroes and started making proclamations. “King Josh! Queen Alex! Queen Yasmine!” They summarily demanded that the threesome take upon themselves the titles of rulership over Mermaid Island; and they were even more insistent on drawing all of them—but particularly Josh, the lone merman—into a frenzied, polyamorous love-fest.  
  
It was a wild celebration that lasted for many splendid, orgiastic hours—but it was as nothing compared to what would come three days later, when the mermaids’ mating-season arrived.

* * *

When the big day came, Josh was excitedly awakened from his slumber on the sandy seabed of the lagoon by Yasmine, Sally, and half a dozen other mermaids. “It’s today!!!” squealed Yasmine, the very instant the merman’s eyes opened. Her hands were clasped together in front of her chest, and she appeared to be on the verge of “squee”-ing in girlish glee. The other mermaids hovering around Josh in the water were likewise barely restraining their excitement.  
  
“Ye promised I’d be third in line, now,” Fiona reminded him.  
  
“Third or fourth, I believe I remember saying,” Josh replied as he flicked his tail and floated up. “Yasmine has first dibs. Then Sally.” He scanned the crowd, but Alex was nowhere to be found. “Okay, Fiona, looks like you’re third after all.”  
  
Josh quickly establish a mermaid mating-order for all the rest of the girls in the crowd—“Okay, then Liesl, Xiuying, Nyah, Jane, Menana, Bianca, Sakura, Nadia, Saoirse, Akhona, and Ines.”—trying his best to stave off disputes and to account for new arrivals, because the crowd never seemed to stop growing.  
  
The process was starting to devolve into an unmanageable mess of little competitions between the mermaids—rock-paper-scissors and that sort of thing—until, at last, Yasmine let out a loud whistle. (How she managed to do that under water, Josh couldn’t tell. But he sure wanted Yasmine to teach _him_ how to do it sometime.) Then she commanded, “You heard His Majesty! The new Queen gets to have him first! So _shove off_ and wait your fucking turn!”  
  
The mermaids grumbled and pouted, but they didn’t argue. They swam away and left the two lovers mostly alone in the lagoon.  
  
Only Sally remained, watching from a short distance away, her arms folded underneath her spectacular tits. “I ain’t goin’ anywhere,” she said.  
  
Josh was in no mood to argue. But apparently Yasmine was inclined to put on a show, because she immediately started making fishy love to her merman, while Sally looked on. Josh did his best to take control and focus on Yasmine—because, on today of all days, there wasn’t really a point in his cumming until after she’d laid her eggs—but when it did finally happen, and Yasmine was shuddering underneath his body and keening with pleasure from his soft touches, nothing else out of the ordinary occurred. It was just like all the other times they’d had fish-sex since the artifact had been destroyed: Yasmine was eventually able to have an orgasm, but no eggs come out.  
  
Before Josh could ask her what was wrong, they both heard Sally doubling herself over in a fit of raucous laughter. She mimed wiping tears from one eye (despite the fact that they were all still underneath the water) and got herself under control by saying, “Hahahahahahah, that was the—the fuckin’ funniest—hahahahah—you two dummies ain’t figured it out yet!?”  
  
Josh helped Yasmine up—she was still glowing, still gazing at him in perfect adoration—and asked Sally, “What’s so damn funny?”  
  
“Mating for mermaids—meaning, us girls, that is—ain’t got nothin’ to do with sex,” Sally laughed. “You can’t make her eggs come out that way!” She kept right on laughing at Josh’s expense as she swam away, heading toward the lagoon exit and the open waters.  
  
“Then how _do_ we get them out?” Josh asked.  
  
Yasmine sighed. “They just… come when it’s time,” she said. “Year after year, it always just sort of… happens. On its own. But I’d hoped, since the artifact was destroyed, that it might be different now.”  
  
“You thought that I might be able to make your eggs come when you did?” said Josh with a grin.  
  
“Well it makes sense, doesn’t it?” said Yasmine. “These past three days, I’ve just felt so… I don’t know, so _human_ again. Or at least, like a woman again. All thanks to Alex, and to you.” She kissed Josh; he kissed back, but not too eagerly, because he supposed that he had to conserve his energy today. Yasmine went on, “But I guess when you get right down to it, I’m still a mermaid. Still just a fucking fish.”  
  
“Hey,” said Josh, pulling Yasmine into a comforting embrace. “I love you. Just the way you are. Legs or tail, cunt or vent, I’m yours.”  
  
“And you’re mine,” said Yasmine. “My _mate_. Assuming everything still goes as expected today.”  
  
“So how exactly does it work, then?” Josh asked. “What’s been normal, all these centuries before now?”  
  
“Well,” said Yasmine, “later this morning, as it gets closer to midday, all of us mermaids are going to start feeling—hot. Almost like, we’re coming down with a mild fever?”  
  
“Okay.” Josh nodded, prompting her to go on.  
  
“For some reason, the only thing that makes it better is swimming out a little ways from the island and floating in the middle waters, about half-way between the surface and the ocean-floor.”  
  
“Then what?”  
  
“Then, we all just sort of… pop, and start scattering our eggs. After that, we’re really tired for the rest of the day, and then by nighttime we feel normal again.”  
  
“That’s it?”  
  
“That’s it.”  
  
“Wow,” said Josh. “So, I’m guessing the eggs are just sort of, everywhere, then?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“No real way to tell yours from anybody else’s?” he asked. “To tell whose eggs are whose?”  
  
“Not really,” said Yasmine. “Without a merman to fertilize them, it’s never mattered before.”  
  
“Yeah, I guess not,” said Josh. Then he sank down to the seabed again and wrapped his tail around himself so that he could sit upright. He needed to think. “How am I going to make this work?”

* * *

In the end, no genius ideas came to Josh’s mind. He figured that he was just going to have to get out there, flip his fins, swim his wiggly merman ass off, and try to make as many of the mermaids as happy as he could manage. And if he couldn’t perform for all of them, well, it was a small matter. He only really cared about making sure that Yasmine’s eggs got fertilized. Because he wanted Yasmine to get what she wanted and be happy. They were mates, after all.  
  
Yasmine had called Josh her mate. And not in a British, “You’re my friend,” sort of way. She meant something more akin to a spouse, or as close to that as one could come in a wild and mystical place like Mermaid Island. The connotation was primal; animalistic; and for Josh, kind of a major turn-on.  
  
Which made it doubly annoying that he had managed to get Yasmine off that morning, but she hadn’t returned the favor—and she wouldn’t, not until there were eggs in the water. Josh suspected that every other mermaid on the island was going to be feeling pretty much the same way, so he decided that he had some time to kill before the big showdown. He started by trying to cool himself off with a shower under the lagoon’s waterfall; then swimming out past the sandbars, seeing how high he could leap up out of the water, dolphin-style, when he really got up to speed; and finally, after that, he tried a nap on the beach to recover his stamina.  
  
At some point while the morning had still been young, he had lost track of Yasmine. She had mentioned something about wondering where Alex had gone off to before swimming away herself. Josh tried not to think too much about what would happen if Alex was around for the egg-laying. Hopefully, nothing untoward.  
  
At about an hour before midday, with the sun creeping high overhead, Sally and two other mermaids that Josh didn’t know as well spied him on the beach and resolved to drag him out to the deeper waters a couple of miles away from the shore of the island, out to the spot where, in Sally’s words, “all the girls are out syncin’ up their eggs together.” Josh couldn’t tell whether she was joking or not, and he didn’t ask.  
  
Nevertheless, he followed, and he was led out to a place that truly felt like “the middle of the ocean”—or at least, the middle of nowhere. He had to have been a hundred meters, maybe more, below the surface; and he certainly could not see the seabed here. Instead, there was nothing but ocean in all directions, and a vague sense that things were a little bit darker if you looked down and a little bit brighter if you looked up.  
  
And then Josh saw them: more than thirty of the sirens that populated Mermaid Island, suspended in the water together and looking for all the world like a swarm of ghostly sea-spirits. But they made for beautiful specters, all: their long hair floating in graceful clouds, their naked breasts offered out to the merman as tribute, their long and powerful fishtails with scales that still glittered even at this depth, and their gauzy tail-fins that swished and swayed in the currents.  
  
Now Josh realized that they were all starting to sing. It was a wordless chorus that rose and fell, many voices in harmony, like a whale-song but much more pleasant and alluring to his ears. A few of these sea-goddesses parted at his approach, and he saw Yasmine in the middle of the crowd, her arms stretched out to him, her face flushed red with the onset of the mating-season.  
  
Josh went to her, fell into her arms, and kissed her softly. There was no urgency now: whatever was going to come would come at its own pace, in its own time. Right now, he just wanted to be with his beloved, and the mermaids around them watched and waited, just as curious about what would soon take place.  
  
When it started, there was little fanfare. One moment, Josh and Yasmine were kissing and petting each other, just enjoying the sensation of being together and floating with a lover in this empty pelagic void; the next, Yasmine got a fierce cramp somewhere below her waistline, causing her to keel over and grunt. The muscles in her fishtail’s loins suddenly began contracting rather violently, and her egg-vent started expelling little orange orbs about the size of shooter-marbles, one after another, in a great mass.  
  
It was clear to Josh that expelling the eggs was taking some sort of toll on Yasmine; at the very least, she seemed to be exerting herself, however involuntarily. She tried to hold onto him, to tease his erogenous zones and perhaps trigger his own release, but there really was nothing for it: laying took up too much of her energy and concentration.  
  
And so a couple of the other mermaids nearby, who had not yet begun to lay, jumped in to help the merman along: it didn’t take much stimulation at all before he too was ejaculating, his seed a white cloud in the water that diffused everywhere. Josh could only hope that his effusions and Yasmine’s found each other and mingled in the waters between them; but there was no real way to be sure.  
  
There was also no rest for the weary: many other mermaids were now also undergoing the same process as Yasmine. Josh saw Sally in one place, Xiuying in another, and Nyah in still another. He swam over to each of them in turn, and to his astonishment, he continued to release cloud after cloud of merman semen. With each new burst, there was a sort of relaxing feeling in his core, but no orgasm. And he realized then that it was exactly as Sally had said earlier: this was not sex; it was just mating. A simple biological function so common to the animal kingdom, and nothing more.  
  
Nothing human, that was for certain.  
  
On it went, minute after minute, as the noonday sun hovered far, far above. To Josh, it became a blur of beautiful faces contorted in mild pain, blushing breasts, gaping egg-holes with trails of slime still dripping from them, and glittering scales and fins. Eventually, he didn’t even notice where the eggs were anymore; there were too many, all over everywhere, to possibly care. After a while, the merman also noticed that his near-constant ejaculation was taking its toll on his own body as well. The passage between his vent and his gonads became dull from the pain of excessive use, and his testes were themselves overworked and swollen. Then he realized that some of the mermaids were already starting to leave the area, to swim back towards the island.  
  
And that was when he saw Alex, one of the last few mer-girls still in the crowd, doubled over and filling the waters around her with eggs of her own.  
  
Before she was even quite done, she made an awkward attempt at swimming over to Josh. It wasn’t pretty, the fatigued and graceless way that she flipped her fins while also still squirting eggs from her midsection; and so Josh met her half-way. He was probably even more exhausted than she was, but he managed. “Hey,” he said.  
  
“Hey, Josh,” said Alex, along with one final grunt as the last of her eggs fell free. “Figured I’d find you out here with every girl on the island. Way to go, Casanova.” She was trying to keep her tone light, but she didn’t quite succeed.  
  
“I don’t think I had a choice,” Josh quipped.  
  
Alex replied, “I don’t think I did either. Something _made_ me want to swim out here. I don’t like it.”  
  
Just then, as if the universe were trying to set a new record for maximum awkwardness, Josh released again, for what must have been at least the thirty-fifth time in as many minutes. Alex stared at the cloud of jizz diffusing outward in all directions away from her cousin’s fish-belly. Then she one-upped every joke that he’d ever made at her expense by saying, “Dad’s gonna be pissed if you knocked me up just now.”  
  
Josh was so mortified, so physically and emotionally spent, that he couldn’t help the fit of crazed laughter that overtook him.  
  
Alex didn’t join in, causing Josh to wonder whether she weren’t being halfway serious after all.  
  
It wasn’t long after that that the last of the mermaids had finished doing their business—that was how Josh was thinking about it now, clinically, mechanically—and Yasmine found him and Alex awkwardly hanging out together, neither speaking nor looking each other in the eye.  
  
She grinned at Josh, swam up and kissed him, and then did the same to Alex. A very short while later, the three of them were swimming hand-in-hand back to the island.  
  
That evening, once the sun had set and everything had stopped aching, Josh and Yasmine and a couple of other girls made love on the beach. Alex was somewhere nearby, rolling around on the sand with Sally and their customary bevy of five or six others. The mermaids were all very excited about the possibility of mer-babies, perhaps huge numbers of them, swimming around the island in great schools. Josh doubted very much that there would be too many children hatched, if any. But the mermaids didn’t care: they just looked forward to the future, to the dream of having a fish-tailed little infant in either arm, each suckling at a breast, and they started coming up with ideas for names.

* * *

Not long after the mating-day, word started spreading around the lagoon that the Great Barrier was gone. In all likelihood, it had disappeared along with Queen Nephi: destroyed, along with the Goddess’s vile artifact. The mermaids were now free to leave the island, to explore the wider ocean, and perhaps even to visit other places and interact with any people they might find living out in the great, wide world beyond this tiny tropical realm.  
  
Some of the mermaids would surely go out into the world, see new sights, meet new people, and travel the seven seas. But for most, Mermaid Island no longer seemed like such a prison. “Shit,” commented Sally one day, when Josh suggested that she might enjoy exploring and visiting distant shores, “why would we ever want to leave _here_? This place is fuckin’ paradise!”

Josh had to agree. He and Yasmine spent many heady days together making love, swimming far out to sea together, ranging wide and seeing all that the vast, deep ocean had to offer. But eventually, they always came back to their little island slice of paradise.

Or rather, they did until the fateful day when Uncle Jack finally teleported Josh and Alex back to his curio shop. It had only been one month for him, back in the real world. But for Josh and Alex, they had been living their lives together on Mermaid Island for at least an entire season.


	8. Chapter 8

When it was finally time for the “vacation” to come to an end, Josh recognized the feeling at once. He felt himself fading away, being pulled from his reality, and so he quickly reached out to Yasmine and held her tightly against his body. His arms wrapped around her back, his fishtail coiled up with hers, and he shouted over the rushing whirlwind of ethereal quintessence between dimensions, “Hang on! This is it—we’re going home!”  
  
Josh and Yasmine weren’t with Alex when the recall-spell took effect; she had gone off somewhere else, probably with a few mer-girlfriends, getting it on in a group, as was her daily custom. But now, as the beaches and waters of Mermaid Island dissolved away, Josh felt his scaly ass thump onto the dry, hard, wooden floor of the study above Uncle Jack’s shop. Alex’s tail then smacked the floor next to his, and a second later, Yasmine gave a startled yelp and landed on top of the both of them in a heap.  
  
“Whoa, would you look at that that!” said Uncle Jack when he saw the three of them appear. “Merpeople!”  
  
“Yeah, Dad, way to go,” snarked Alex. “You stranded us in a mermaid dimension for, like, four months. There was an evil Queen who could’ve killed us. So, you know, good job.”  
  
The wizard blinked. “Alex? Is that you?”  
  
Alex groaned. “Yes, Dad, it’s me.”  
  
“Why are _you_ a mermaid!?”  
  
Josh, meanwhile, tried to untangle himself from Yasmine and picked himself up off the floor as best as he was able. His tailfin was still involuntarily flopping and thumping on the ground; he actually had to concentrate to make it stop moving. “Hey, Uncle Jack,” he said. “This is Yaz. She’s my—” He paused. How should he introduce her? As his girlfriend? Lover? Fiancée? “—my significant other.”  
  
“Oh,” said Uncle Jack in mild surprise. Then he nodded approvingly. “Way to go, kiddo! It’s not just anyone who can say they’ve netted a mermaid! And she’s a real looker, too!”  
  
“It’s very lovely to meet you,” said Yasmine, who also picked herself up and tried to sit upright on the hard floor in spite of her tail. “And if it isn’t too much trouble, we’d very much like to have legs and—um, other human parts as well. As soon as possible, if you please.”  
  
Alex groaned again and facepalmed. “Did you have to bring _that_ up in front of my dad?”  
  
Uncle Jack just guffawed at that and said, “What about you, Alex? No hot merman to bring home and meet the folks?”  
  
“There was only Josh,” said Alex honestly. (Josh seriously hopped that Alex didn’t mean that as a double entendre; regardless, Uncle Jack didn’t give any indication of having taken it as such.) “Plenty of cute mermaids to date, but nobody I’d want to bring home and pick out curtains with. I had my fun, but I didn’t fall in love like these two idiots.”  
  
“Ah, well, better luck next time,” said Uncle Jack. “Just so you know, I’ve got a fun little adventure lined up for all of you in a centaur-forest. Heroic quests, knights and castles, that kind of thing. For some other time, if you’re interested.”  
  
“Sounds grand,” said Yasmine. “But can you please make with the legs? Or aren’t you a wizard, as these two claim?”  
  
“Please, Uncle Jack,” said Josh, looking earnestly up at him. “Do what the lady says. I seriously miss having legs and—* _ahem_ *—other things. Especially now that I have a serious girlfriend.”  
  
“All right, all right, hold your horses,” said the kooky mage. He went over to his desk, opened the drawer, and took out a wand of teakwood and a small crystalline bottle. He then walked back out into the middle of the room, where the three merpeople were all still sitting in the center of a freshly-chalked summoning-circle, and he poured the liquid contents of the bottle out onto all of their fishtails. He made a few magical passes with his wand and his free hand, and he mumbled a few magic words under his breath.  
  
Josh could feel the scales on his tail begin to melt away. His big muscular fishtail, a part of him these past four months (and it felt like a cherished companion now, in a weird and inexplicable sort of way) shrank and split down the middle. His caudal flipper split in half and morphed back into feet, and the two long floppy appendages that used to be his tail took on the hue of flesh and the definition and solidity of legs. As the last of his scales disappeared around his waistline, Josh’s pelvic fins shrank back into his thighs, and he suddenly felt a marvelous sensation in his groin as his testicles became external to his body again, his scrotum re-grew around them, and his dick reappeared and grew back to its original, respectable, normal human size.  
  
Finally, Josh’s clothes—the very clothes that he had been wearing when he had first been transported to Mermaid Island—reappeared around him.  
  
At the same time, Alex was transforming back into her original self, with her old, male body—slightly altered by all the swimming and pulling herself around that she’d done as a mermaid, so that now she appeared to be a little more fit than she’d been before.  
  
As Alex’s clothing likewise reappeared over “his” body, Yasmine covered her mouth and let out a little squeak of surprise. “Alex!” she cried. “You really _are_ a boy!”

“No,” corrected Alex, “I’m a girl stuck in a stupid, ugly boy-body. Speaking of which: hi, Dad. I’m transgender. Surprise!”  
  
“What, you mean you thought I didn’t know?” said Jack. “I’m a wizard; I’m not stupid!”  
  
“Pfft, whatever,” said Alex with a roll of “his” eyes. “Anyway, now that the cat’s out of the bag, do you think you could use some of your magic and do something about—all of this?” Alex waved a hand in front of “his” body in distaste.  
  
“There are plenty of spells on these bookshelves,” said the wizard with a noncommittal shrug. “I’m sure I can come up with something.”  
  
Meanwhile, Yasmine was staring down at her fishtail in growing dismay, a feeling that was quickly turning to dread. “Why am I not changing?” she asked, looking up at Uncle Jack. “ _Why am I still a bloody mermaid!?_ ” And sure enough, even though Josh and Alex were now completely back to normal and standing up on their own legs and feet, Yasmine hadn’t even begun to transform back into a human—not one little bit.  
  
Uncle Jack thought for a moment and then said, “Something must’ve gone wrong with my counter-spell. Say; you weren’t born a mermaid, were you? It wouldn’t work if you’ve always been a mermaid.”  
  
“No, of course I wasn’t bloody born as a mermaid!” said Yasmine in frustration.  
  
“Then, if you don’t mind my asking, how’d you get turned into one in the first place?” asked the wizard.

“Why, the same as these two,” said Yasmine, pointing at Josh and Alex. “Everyone who comes to Mermaid Island appears there already _changed_. Of course, most of us got there by dying, but—”

“Dying!?” exclaimed Uncle Jack. “Can you… elaborate on that?”

“Well,” said Yasmine, “from what I was given to understand, any woman murdered at sea by a man at any point within the last three-thousand or so years apparently had a small chance of being spontaneously brought back to life, to live on Mermaid Island as an immortal mermaid.”

“Oh, dear,” said Jack woefully. “I’m afraid… there may not be anything I can do for you.”

“What!?” cried Yasmine. “Why in the hell not!?”

“Well, you _died_ ,” explained Uncle Jack. “Your human body is gone, and with it, so is all your humanity. It was your _soul_ that got turned into a mermaid. You were literally _reborn_ when you were given a new corporeal form in the island’s pocket dimension and anchored there. In simplest terms, you have the soul of a mermaid now—or rather, you _are_ the soul of a mermaid. It’s not just who or what you are: it’s your _essence._ And even a thirteenth level arch-magus can’t change someone’s essence.”

Yasmine looked up at Jack and Josh helplessly, now verging on tears. Josh turned to his uncle and asked him, “Isn’t there anything at all that you can do?”

Uncle Jack frowned in consternation and thought for a moment. Then he said, “Tell you what. Why don’t you two go get something eat and make yourselves comfortable, while I work on Alex’s little problem first. That should be easy enough to fix right up. Then I’ll do some research, maybe consult with a few friends that I got to touch bases with recently during the wizard’s conference, and we’ll see where we can go from there. How does that sound?”

“I suppose it’s better than nothing,” said Yasmine with a doleful sigh.

“Hey, now,” said Josh, kneeling down to pick Yasmine up in his arms. “Everything’s gonna work out okay; you’ll see.” He tried to heft the mermaid up off the floor, but it was a struggle. Josh was no weakling; but Yasmine was _very_ heavy, given that her tail was still a five-foot column of solid muscle, after all. Plus, there was the fact that Yaz was still naked as a jaybird, and the enticing sight of her bare breasts was giving Josh a familiar tightening sensation in his pants that he hadn’t realized until just now how much he’d really missed…

“Ever the optimist,” said Yasmine with a sultry smile. “You know I love that about you.”

Their faces came close, and their lips were just about to brush together in a sweet kiss, when Alex gave a sharp hand-clap and snapped, “Hey! Lovebirds! We’re not on paradise island anymore, so if you two wanna get frisky, go find yourselves a bedroom already!”

“You know where the guest room is,” said Uncle Jack to Josh in a helpful tone.

Josh and Yasmine both blushed, and Josh made his best effort at scurrying out of the study while also lugging a mermaid who weighed more than twice as much as an ordinary human. As they left, they could both hear Alex saying, “All right, Dad! Let’s make with the magic!”

* * *

Josh carried Yasmine out into the living room and set her down onto the sofa. He needed to rest and catch his breath for a bit before he tried bearing her all the way to the guest room. “Guess this proves it,” said Josh, stretching out his arms and getting ready to pick her back up again.

“Proves what?”

“That I’m just a normal dude again. No magic; no heroics. Just me.” Josh smiled shyly and asked, “How do you like the real me, by the way?”

Yasmine grinned and ran a hand up the length of his trousers. “I think you’re just as handsome as ever, even without that lovely blue tail of yours.” Her hand drifted over to his crotch, and she felt at his stiffening manhood through the fabric. “I’m _very_ happy to see that you’ve gotten this back.”

“Hopefully, you’ll have something to match it soon,” said Josh. He bent down to take Yasmine into his arms again, but then he paused while leaning over her and asked, “Do you ever worry that it’s going to be different? Now that we’re back in the real world? Back to our real lives, where we’ll have to deal with—you know, jobs and money and other people and everything?”

“I think that as long as I can become human again, we’ll manage just fine,” said Yasmine, who leaned up and planted a quick kiss on Josh’s lips. “Oh, but I’ve just had a horrid thought. I’m going to have to get _documentation_ somehow! …Do you think my papers will show that I’m nineteen, or fifty-six?”

“Um; let’s just hope that Uncle Jack’s magic doesn’t turn you into a fifty-six year old woman,” said Josh. “No offense.”

“None taken,” said Yasmine with a giggle. At the same time, Josh finally hoisted her up again; and as he did so, her fishtail brushed against the bulge in his groin. Yasmine ran a finger along his collarbone suggestively and said, “Why, Joshua, my love, I do believe you have an _erection_.”

“Oh? Are you _suggesting_ something, gorgeous?”

“I _am_ tempted,” she admitted. “Sorely tempted. But the next time we make love, I’d really like to have a vagina.”

“No more rubbing our scales together,” Josh whispered huskily into Yaz’s ear.

“No more squirting anything into the seawater around us,” Yaz answered back in a breathy voice.

And then _it_ suddenly hit them both, right at the exact same time. Yasmine slapped a hand over her mouth, and Josh very nearly dropped her onto the floor right there. “ ** _Our eggs!_** ” they both shouted in unison.

* * *

Uncle Jack and Alex came rushing out of the study at the commotion. Yasmine was on the sofa, nearly in hysterics, bawling her eyes out; and Josh was standing next to her, on the verge of having a panic-attack himself.

“What’s the matter?” asked Alex.

At the sound of her high-pitched, girlish voice, Josh and Yaz both turned and were amazed to see that Alex had already been transmogrified back into a girl. In fact, she once again sported the exact same wavy-blonde hair, the same supermodel face and figure, and the same spectacular rack that she’d sported as a mermaid. Only now, she stood on two shapely human legs.

“You have to send us back!” wailed Yasmine. “We need to go back!”

“Change me back!” shouted Josh in a frantic tone. “Make me a merman again, Uncle Jack!”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said the wizard. “Hold everything and back the truck up. What do you mean, you want to go _back_?”  
  
“We have to!” cried Yasmine. “Three months ago, I laid _eggs_ , and Josh fertilized them!”  
  
Alex turned to her father and said, “Oh, he fertilized _lots_ of mermaids’ eggs that day, not just Yaz’s. Fuck, he probably even got some of _mine_. That was one hell of a day…” She sighed with nostalgia.  
  
“Well; I’m sorry,” said Uncle Jack, “but I can’t just ‘send you back’. Not for a while, anyway.”  
  
“You can’t!?” Josh shouted, and at the same time, Yasmine yelled, “Why not!?”  
  
“Because of—” Uncle Jack paused and tried to put his thoughts into simple words. “Because of dimensional alignments and whole bunch of other complicated wizard-shit! I’m sorry, but I won’t be able to open the portal to that particular reality again until at least three months have gone by here in our world!”  
  
“But… but…” Yasmine blubbered with tears streaming down her cheeks, “what if our children hatch, and we’re not there!? What will happen to our babies!?”  
  
“Maybe you should have thought of that _earlier_ ,” grumbled Alex. “Selfish fuckin’ idiots.”  
  
Josh was feeling just as absolutely panic-stricken as Yaz was, but in spite of this, he sat down next to her on the couch and tried to hug her close and comfort her. “There, now,” he said, running a hand through her hair. “It’ll be okay, you’ll see. We’ll just hang out here and be normal for three months, and then we’ll go back and live on Mermaid Island and raise our family there together.”  
  
Yasmine didn’t stop crying. “But… if four months on the island translated to one month here,” she sobbed, “then three months here will mean a _year_ back there! Our babies will already be growing up!!!”  
  
Josh looked over at Uncle Jack and asked, “Is that how it works?”

“Not even a little bit,” said the wizard. “The flow of time between different dimensions is totally variable. There’s no real way to predict how it’s all going to go.”  
  
That only caused Yasmine to burst into another round of racking sobs and wordless wails.  
  
“It’s okay,” Josh whispered. “It’s all right. Even if they do hatch before we can get to them, there are going to be lots of other mermaid-mommies around to take care of our little swimmers, right? They’ll be safe, and we’ll find our way back to them. I promise.”  
  
Yasmine frowned, but she nodded and kissed Josh through salty tears.

“There’s my girl,” he said to her. “We have to be brave now, okay?” After another moment’s thought, he looked to Uncle Jack and said, “I can’t keep carrying her everywhere. I don’t suppose you still have that old wheelchair down in the shop?”

* * *

“You’re lucky that Dad still had this old thing,” said Alex, wheeling an old-fashioned bath-chair into the living room. It was much larger than a modern wheelchair, so it would be able to support Yaz’s massive tail. With the addition of a blanket to conceal her scales and fins, she might even be able to go out in public using this thing.

“It’s perfect,” said Josh. He helped Yasmine to climb into the chair and get comfortable.

Yasmine had managed to stop sobbing while Alex had gone down to the curio shop to locate the bath-chair. But she was still feeling pretty glum. “I’d like to do something,” she said, wiping her eyes.

“Like what?” asked Josh.

“I don’t know. Anything. Something to keep me distracted while your uncle does his research.”

Alex went over to the TV and picked up an X-BOX controller. “What do you say we introduce Yaz to the wonders of modern video gaming?”

“I’ve got a better idea,” said Josh. He smiled at Yasmine and asked her, “How would you like to watch _The Return of the Jedi_?”

Yasmine blinked away fresh tears and smiled back. “With popcorn?”

Josh nodded. “Sounds perfect.”

Alex rolled her eyes. “I’ll take care of it. What does everybody want to drink?”

* * *

Some time after the movie had ended, Uncle Jack finally emerged from his study. He had a pensive look on his face, and he was carrying his teak wand and a leather-bound tome. He ambled over to an easy-chair near the couch where Alex, Yasmine, and Josh were all sitting together; he plopped himself down in the seat and said, “So. I’ve looked into your problem.”

Yasmine sat up straight. “And what have you found?”

Jack sighed. “I’m sorry to say, I can’t give you legs. A mermaid is what you are now—it’s your essence—and it’s an immutable fact of the multiverse that a mermaid has to be human from the waist up and fish from the waist down.”

“Well, damn!” said Yasmine, folding her arms across her (still bare) chest and looking away. “And here, I was hoping I could finally have a proper shag…”

Josh reached over and took Yasmine’s hands in his. “It’s okay, honey,” he said. “Like I’ve told you before, I love you no matter what.”

“I love you too,” Yasmine whispered sadly.

Uncle Jack blushed and cleared his throat. “ _Ahem_ ; if it’s just a little good old-fashioned nookie you’re looking for, I think I actually _can_ help you out with that part.”

Yasmine and Josh both snapped their gazes over to the wizard, and Yasmine excitedly said, “You can!?”

At that point, Alex jumped up off the couch and thrust her hands into her pockets. “Okay, I am officially _done_ with this conversation,” she said. “If anybody needs me, I’ll be downstairs watching the shop.” With that, she made her exit.

Uncle Jack then turned back to Yasmine and said, “Well, it may be an unbreakable magical law that you have to be half-fish, but the law doesn’t specify what _kind_ of fish. Not every species fertilizes externally, you know.”

“Oh, that’s right!” said Josh with a snap of his fingers. “Like guppies and sharks!”

“Well I certainly don’t want to be half _guppy_!” snorted Yasmine.

“Shark it is, then,” said Uncle Jack. “That was going to be my suggestion anyway.” Then, without further warning, he raised up his wand, waved it at Yasmine, and bellowed out an echoing incantation.

Yasmine gasped at the sudden rush of sensations, and she reached out for Josh and clung to him as her tail _changed_. On the outside, her scales shrank (although they remained pink in color) and morphed into shark-skin. On the inside, bone and cartilage rearranged themselves with a series of sickening cracking noises that made Yasmine wince in pain along with each one. Finally, a noise like the sound of cloth tearing accompanied the transmutation of Yasmine’s tailfin from that of a ray-finned fish into a set of flukes with an unmistakably sharky appearance. Curiously, her tailfin was still horizontal relative to her body, so that she would swim by moving her tail up and down like a dolphin rather than side-to-side like a real fish.

When the transformation was complete, Josh and Yasmine both looked down at her new tail in fascination. All in all, it didn’t appear to have changed all that much. It was still roughly the same size, the same mass, and even the same color. The only really obvious differences were the texture of her new shark-skin and the more substantial shark-fin down at the very end of her tail.

“It’s still pink,” said Josh. He had honestly expected that her tail would turn gray.

“Do you like it?” asked Yasmine. She ran her hands up and down her tail, curious about its new texture. It didn’t feel rough at all, but it couldn’t quite be called smooth either. It was interesting.

Josh stroked her tail too and said, “It’s beautiful, Yaz.” Then he looked into her eyes and said, “ _You’re_ beautiful.” He leaned in close, and they kissed, until Uncle Jack cleared his throat.

“ _Ahem_ ,” said the wizard, standing up out of the easy-chair. “Why don’t I give you two some privacy, what say?”

Josh and Yasmine were still gazing at each other’s faces intently. “Good idea,” said Josh.

* * *

With the help of the bath-chair, Josh moved Yasmine from the living room to the guest room. Once they were in private—it felt weird to think of privacy now, after four months on a fantasy-island where constant nudity was the only option and public sex was so often the norm—he helped her over to the bed. Yasmine made herself comfortable and enjoyed the feeling of a real, actual comforter underneath her naked form. Then she leaned back on the pillow, put her arms behind her head in such a way that it thrust out her bare chest invitingly, and said, “Now strip, mister!”

Josh wasted no time removing his clothes and climbing onto the bed next to his girlfriend. They held each other in their arms, petting one another and making out, getting hotter and heavier. Yasmine reached down to stroke Josh’s member with her hand, which made him gasp; and in turn, he felt his way up the length of her new shark-tail’s tropical-pink belly. “Want to see what you have now?”

“I _am_ curious,” said Yasmine. They shared another heated kiss, and then she reached her hand down to her midsection and felt at her groin.

Josh moved down along the length of bed a little bit, so that he could peer closely at Yaz’s new anatomy. There was a slit there, much bigger than her old egg-vent had been, and Josh and Yasmine soon discovered that they could easily pry it open with their fingers, revealing a pink tunnel of flesh within.

“Mmmm,” Yasmine moaned pleasantly. “I can really feel that. Is it a—?”

“Well it’s certainly not an egg-vent,” said Josh. He probed the orifice with his fingers and noted the absence of labial folds or any kind of structure like a clitoris. “But it’s not really a vagina either. A cloaca, I think you call it.”

“I don’t care what you call it,” said Yasmine, “as long as you can _fuck_ it.”

Josh looked up into his lover’s eyes and grinned. “Watch me.”

Yasmine did more than watch. She curled her tail underneath herself on the bed and took Josh’s cock into her mouth. She started going down on him with absolute abandon, bobbing her head up and down while also looking up and maintaining eye-contact with Josh whenever possible. Josh was nearly overwhelmed by the pleasurable sensations—he finally had his dick back, after all this time; and heaven help him, Yasmine was doing _that_ to it! He soon found himself lying with his back flat on the bed while Yasmine worked his shaft with her hands and lips and tongue. After several minutes of glorious fellatio, she gave the head of his penis one long, final lick and said, “Well, how about it, lover? Are you ready to fuck my shark-pussy?”

Wordlessly, Josh rolled over and crawled into position. She didn't have to ask him twice.


	9. Chapter 9

Josh captured Yasmine’s mouth with his, and their tongues danced together erotically. He groped at her magnificent tits, and she reached down and used her hands to guide the tip of his member to her new opening. Briefly, Josh wondered whether he shouldn’t go down on her as well, but it seemed that Yasmine was now excited enough to be well beyond the need or desire for more foreplay—“I want this cock inside of me _right now_ ,” she said, breathless in her yearning—and so Josh obliged. He buried himself in the wet heat of the mermaid’s cloaca, amazed to discover that he was able to hilt himself on the first thrust with little resistance and only a gasp of joyful surprise from Yasmine.

The angle was awkward: they had to lay side-by-side to make it work at all; but neither of them minded that. As Josh found a rhythm and kept up the pace of his thrusts, Yasmine cried out, and soon her breath was coming in short, ragged gasps. They made passionate love to each other in that fashion for several long and luxurious minutes, Josh finally drilling and filling Yasmine at long last, as he’d fantasied about doing many a time while he’d still been trapped in the body of a merman. The mermaid sex back on the island had been fun enough, especially once that cursed crystal phylactery had been destroyed; and Josh truly believed that he could have lived with it for the rest of his life if that was what it took to be with Yasmine.

But _this_ —the kind of sex that he knew and loved, real _human_ sex (at least on his side of the equation)—was something that Josh had definitely missed and craved. Yasmine certainly seemed to be enjoying herself too, even though her new anatomy was still quite a bit _simpler_ in structure than a human woman’s. (In point of fact, the lack of true labia and a clit meant that her shark-snatch was actually now rather similar in both form and in overall sensation to a human woman’s genitalia with those external parts surgically removed—entirely setting aside the fraught politics and immorality of such a deplorable practice as female genital mutilation.) Yasmine was still able to come, eventually; but to both Josh’s surprise and hers, finally getting there wasn’t actually any easier for her than when she’d still been a “classic” mermaid with the scaled tail of a pelagic fish and no kind of external genitalia at all.

Nevertheless, Yasmine and Josh both relished the opportunity to finally join together and be “of one flesh” (to borrow an old and very overused Biblical phrase). Something about the closeness—the true _intimacy_ —of real intercourse was just plain _better_ than the desperate, fumbling nipple-play and vent-diddling of the island merfolk.

Once the two lovers were spent—which only happened after a second round of lovemaking, during which Josh finally tried eating out Yaz’s shark-pussy, and she in turn demanded that Josh use “that wonderful human cock” of his to fuck her between the tits—they cuddled together on the bed for a while, whispering sweet pillow-talk to each other and discussing their plans for the future.

They discussed the near future, all of the fun things that they wanted to do together now that they were back in the human world. (Back on the island, Yasmine had spoken often of the things she missed: walking and running, dancing, going out on the town and having dinner in a restaurant, or seeing movies in a theater. Naturally, a great many of those things were still very much off the table at the moment, but certainly not _all_ of them.) They also talked about more long-term matters, like the possibility of someday returning to Mermaid Island and raising their children there.

Josh, in particular, held that retiring to an island paradise at the age of twenty-one didn’t sound like such a bad idea at all. The only real question in his mind was, if he did go back, would the island change him into a merman again, or had that particular magic been destroyed along with Queen Nephi, her twisted artifact, and the Great Barrier? Moreover, supposing that he meant to keep up with a school of fishtailed mer-children and be a real father to them, did he even _want_ to keep his human form?

Then, a worrisome thought occurred to Josh. What would his parents and the rest of his family think, if he were to up and disappear off the face of the Earth, without word or explanation? He wasn’t sure that he could do that to them, even for the sake of Yasmine and their kids.

* * *

The day after the trio’s return to the real world, Josh resolved to take Yasmine out on a proper date. The mid-June evening was beautiful and pleasantly warm, and Yasmine was positively thrilled by the prospect of getting out and being among real people again. And so they went out and tried to do as much as possible in one night, ticking off as many boxes as they could from Yasmine’s list of things that she’d missed so much about being human. They went to dinner at a fancy restaurant. They visited a cinema and took in a show. They went to a dance club and enjoyed drinks and music, even though Yasmine couldn’t actually get up from her bath-chair to join in the actual dancing. Finally, they went for a stroll on the boardwalk together, Josh pushing Yasmine along in her chair.

They both had a great deal of fun, but the evening wasn’t without its problems. Even though Yasmine’s mermaid nature was concealed under borrowed clothes and a blanket to hide her tail and fins, she constantly feared discovery—as if, at any moment, someone might bump into her and knock her out of her wheelchair, or get something caught on the blanket and rip it away from her, exposing her tail for all the world to see. At the restaurant and in the movie-theater, the bath-chair took up an inordinate amount of space: she’d been obliged to position it sideways next to the dinner-table, and it very nearly didn’t fit into the disabled-persons’ space among the rows of theater-seats.

Worst of all, Yasmine quickly came to realize that the world of 2019 was not the world that she’d left behind when she had died in 1982. She was a little weirded out by smartphones, and by the way that everybody always seemed to be staring down at them all the time. At one point, shortly after they’d left the dance club together, they had both heard someone hurl a nasty racial epithet at Yasmine because she was Middle Eastern.

Later that night, when they both got back to the curio shop, more problems surfaced. Josh knew that his parents were coming to pick him up in three days’ time. Yasmine had nowhere else to go, and Josh seriously doubted that his family would be willing to take her in just because she was his girlfriend. That meant that Yasmine would have to continue to stay with Alex and Uncle Jack for the time being—only, neither of the two lovers wanted to be parted from each other for even a minute.

It was after midnight when they both retired to the condo guest room. Uncle Jack’s place was dark and quiet—he and Alex were both likely already in bed—and so Josh and Yasmine once again took the opportunity to make slow and tender love in a real bed. The novelty of having real, penetrative sex (even if it was _cloacal_ sex rather than _vaginal_ sex) still hadn’t worn off yet, and neither had the freshness of properly being able to give each other head.

The sex itself was more than satisfying for both of them, but in a weird way, Josh also found that he was already missing the openness of the society (such as it was) on Mermaid Island—both the way that the mermaids never really concerned themselves with things like clothing or privacy or personal boundaries, and the general expectation of universal polyamory. Being in the human world again, even after only a day, was (in a word) stifling to Josh—and it was even worse for Yasmine, who had dwelt on Mermaid Island for twice as long as she’d ever lived as a human girl.  
  
The two lovers cuddled together in their shared bed and basked in the afterglow of their lovemaking, Yasmine’s long tail falling out over one side, the huge shark-fin brushing on the floor; and together they drifted off to sleep. As Josh slid into dreamland, he resolved to do what he felt was best for himself, for Yasmine, and for their potential kids. He was going to return to Mermaid Island, given half a chance. He was going to bring Yasmine with him and help her track down their fertilized eggs, or newly-hatched fry, or whatever was there to be found. He was going to ask Yasmine to marry him just as soon as he managed to acquire a ring. And he would be happy living out the rest of his days on that island as a merman, if that proved to be the best way he could be a husband to Yaz and a father to their mer-children.

That night, he dreamed that he was back on the island: back with Yasmine, back with Alex, and back with all the other mer-girls. He dreamed of little mer-babies and the indescribable pride and joy he felt at holding a beautiful little curly-haired, fishtailed infant—his and Yaz’s offspring—as he sat upon one of the rocks beneath the waterfall in the lagoon…

* * *

It took some convincing, but Josh eventually managed to get his parents to let him stay with Uncle Jack for a second month. It was still the summer break between school years, he’d argued, so what was the harm? In the end, he’d had to make up a story and pretend that Uncle Jack had offered him a temporary summer job working in the curio shop. Josh’s parents still didn’t know anything about Yasmine, and neither did Josh bother to mention Alex’s unexpectedly rapid transition to a female-presenting identity. He supposed that he would have to tell them everything eventually, but for the time being, it was simply easier to stave off the hard conversations and the fantastically unbelievable stories for as long as possible.  
  
In short, he took the path of least resistance.  
  
As for Alex… Alex was not settling back into normal human life nearly half as well as she had imagined she would. Her new, magically-provided girl’s body was undeniably attractive—the same as when she’d still been a mermaid, after all—and she quickly found that she had no trouble at all scoring with strangers of either gender. She had _game_ now—but even though she now found herself endowed with the opportunity to experience all the pick-ups and hook-ups and one-night-stands that she ever could have dreamed of, that was about as far as it ever went. She didn’t develop any new attachments to anyone: no prospects with the potential to become a long-term relationship. And from the way that she would wistfully speak of her time back on Mermaid Island, and wax nostalgic about the mermaids that she’d left behind back there, Josh was coming around to the suspicion that she missed that magical place and all of its quirky inhabitants even more than he and Yaz did.

And that was even taking into account the fact that Alex had only been there for the same four months that Josh had, which was more than enough time for her to grow quite attached to some of the mermaids—Sally in particular. Yasmine, meanwhile, had been among them for nearly forty years—it was more than apparent that she missed them very dearly. They were her family.  
  
By the time that another two weeks had passed, Josh’s resolve to eventually return to the island had only deepened, although he still hadn’t quite worked up the courage to formally pop the question to Yasmine. But then, he considered, what even was a wedding ring or a marriage license on Mermaid Island? They were kind of meaningless, when one really stopped and thought about it.  
  
Still, the wait was interminable, knowing that Uncle Jack couldn’t even attempt to send them back for another—they were all were keeping count—fifteen weeks and change.  
  
So it was to Josh’s great surprise—and great hope—one day when he turned on the TV and discovered that every single channel was reporting on the sudden flurry of credible mermaid sightings in the Caribbean and the Middle Atlantic Ocean. There were phone-recorded videos going viral on the internet, coming from several different island locations and ships at sea, the latter ranging from fishing-boats to cruise-liners.  
  
“Hey Yaz! Alex! You gotta see this!” Josh shouted, knowing that they were both hanging around down in the curio-shop below the condo. He tore down the stairs as fast as his legs could carry him, hollering all the way.

Sure enough, he found both girls downstairs, sitting behind the shop-counter, watching the breaking news on an old tube-TV that had been hooked up to an antenna with a digital receiver. The headlines were splayed out on a rolling chyron at the bottom of the screen: _Mermaids exist. Film at 11._

Alex snapped her fingers and cried, “Of course!” Then she leaned over to Yasmine and grabbed her, joyfully giving her a celebratory hug. “Don’t you see? With the Barrier down, the Island’s not in a pocket-dimension anymore! It’s been back in the real world this whole time!”  
  
“It has?” said Josh, stunned. “You mean, we could just… _go_ there!?”  
  
“Of course!” squealed Yasmine, and pretty soon her tailfin was flopping with happy anticipation. “We should have guessed! With no Barrier, we can come and go as we please now! We don’t have to pick one world or the other—we can live in both!”  
  
“But, how do we find the island?” asked Josh. “Think Uncle Jack can just zap us back there now?”  
  
“Maybe,” mused Alex. “Provided the island exists _completely_ within our dimension now, he shouldn’t need to resort to an interplanar portal. On the other hand…” she paused and stared at the TV screen, which was now displaying a map of the ocean pinpointing all the various locations of the recent mermaid-sightings. “Look at that. The epicenter is a dead ringer for the Bermuda Triangle!”  
  
Josh and Yasmine looked at each other cynically. Of fucking _course_ it was.  
  
“That sure explains why the portal wasn’t always open,” said Alex. “Complicated Wizard Shit 101: pay attention to the ley-lines, and always, _always_ follow the mana. The Bermuda Triangle is one of the top three nexuses on Earth, right up there with Stonehenge and those Nazca lines.”  
  
“So… no portal,” muttered Josh.  
  
“No, of course not,” said Yasmine. “That’s not how you get lost in the Bermuda Triangle. You need to take a ship, or an aeroplane.”  
  
“I think we can manage that,” said Josh. _Let’s see,_ he thought to himself. _We need to somehow get to Florida. Rent a boat._ _I don’t have a lot of money; I’m pretty sure Alex doesn’t either; and of course Yaz is flat broke. But what does that matter? It’s not like we need our savings. We’re going back!  
_  
Alex and Yasmine suddenly echoed his thoughts aloud. “We’re going back!” they cried, hugging each other again and laughing.

On the TV, a news reporter was now interviewing a very excited, very drunk cruise-boat captain. None of them were paying much attention, though, because Josh had rather unexpectedly decided that _this_ , of all times, was the right time to do something momentous: he got down on one knee next to Yasmine’s wheelchair and asked her to be his wife.

Naturally, Yasmine was elated. “Yes!” she cried. “Yes, yes, of course yes!”

Josh didn’t have a ring; Yasmine certainly didn’t seem to mind. But as the two lovers shared a romantic kiss, Alex decided to fix that. Tears forming in her eyes, she opened up the safe underneath the shop-counter, selected a tasteful gold band set with a stone of aquamarine, and passed it over to her cousin. “Here,” she said, “use this. I’m sure Dad won’t mind.” Then she stood back, covered her mouth with both hands, and muttered under her breath, “Stupid fucking idiots.”

Yasmine beamed and flicked her fins as Josh slid the ring onto her finger.

* * *

Alex left the newly-engaged pair to their privacy and went upstairs to track down her father, who at the present moment was… _elsewhere_ , doing something wizardly, but it’s better not to elaborate any further on the details. The point is, Alex was able to summon her father back into his study from the mysterious mage’s momentary _elsewhere_ and ask for his help in arranging transportation.

“—To the Bermuda Triangle?” Jack said to his daughter in astonishment. “You’re right. A ship _would_ be much faster than waiting on the portal to realign. All right, I’ll see what I can do. I think I can have something ready by tomorrow.”  
  
Alex kissed her wizard-dad on the cheek and told him, “Thanks for everything, Papa. We don’t want to go away forever, but it may still be a long time before we decide to come back, so… we’ll all really miss you. _I’ll_ miss you.”  
  
Uncle Jack smiled. He only wanted his kids to be happy. But he did promise to look in on them from time to time, and also to leave them a little better prepared this time around for an extended stay on a magical island.

* * *

Once Josh heard the good news from Alex, he was just as excited as she and Yasmine were. He turned to his fiancée and confessed to her, “I promised myself that when it was time to go back, I’d have Uncle Jack turn me back into a merman.”  
  
“Really!?” she asked. (Josh nodded, resolved.) “But, you don’t _need_ to do that, though,” said Yasmine, concern evident in her voice. “You did make a very handsome merman, to be sure; and I’ll admit, I’ve missed swimming in the sea with you. But… if you let yourself be changed again, you won’t have a cock!”  
  
“I know,” said Josh. “But it’s really not so bad, being a merman. And besides, if we do have a bunch of mer-kids waiting for us at the island, I need to be able to swim and breathe water. It’s the only way I can be there for them full-time.”  
  
Yasmine nodded. “I understand all that. But… I don’t think this new body of mine lays eggs like the old one did. If you don’t have anything to put inside me—”  
  
“Damn,” said Josh. “I hadn’t considered that. You’d be my wife, and also the only mermaid on the whole damned island I couldn’t have any more children with.”  
  
“No worries,” said Alex flippantly. She threw an arm around Josh’s shoulder and explained, “You can just ask Dad to give you a shark-tail to match the one he gave Yaz. That way, the two of you can still fuck like bunnies all you want, and—” here, Alex brazenly mimed the act of jerking someone off, “—you could still fertilize the other girls’ eggs. If you really wanted to.”

“No,” said Yasmine, shaking her head and gripping Josh’s arm possessively. “Not that; not anymore. I may have been willing to share while we were all trapped on that island together and Josh was the _only_ available male; but now? Let the other girls swim off find their own husbands, than you very much! This one is _mine._ ”

Alex smirked. “You do realize, once Josh shows back up on Mermaid Island with a brand-new pair of shark-dicks—”

“Wait, wait, wait,” said Josh, holding up a hand to stop his cousin. “What do you mean, a _pair_!?”

“They’re called _claspers_ ,” said Alex with a suggestive waggle of her eyebrows. “But that’s beside the point. What I’m trying to say here is, the other mermaids will _not_ leave you alone once you turn up again—with actual _junk_ downstairs!”

Josh smiled wide, a goofy look of pleased anticipation on his face; and Yasmine rolled her eyes and said, “Well of course they won’t, obviously. Not that I’d ever try to stop them.” She looked up at Josh, pointed a demanding finger, and added, “But no more cumming on their eggs! From now on, the only mermaid you’re allowed to have children with is _me_!”

Josh put his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Whatever you say, babe. You’re the boss.”

Yasmine folded her arms and frowned. “I think I’m being more than fair; wouldn’t you agree, Alex?”

Alex _did_ agree, but she couldn’t help herself. Instead of answering, she just laughed.

* * *

That evening, Alex called Josh and Yasmine into her father’s arcane study. Uncle Jack was nowhere to be found—he was probably still off somewhere strange and mystical, still “arranging transportation”. Alex was sitting in the chair behind Jack’s desk, two stoppered potion-bottles on the desktop in front of her. “Dad left these for us,” she said to Josh, tilting her head in the direction of the bottles. “One dose of ‘instant shark-tail’ for you; one dose of ‘mermaid classic’ for me.”

“Classic?” repeated Yasmine. “You’re not going to give yourself a tail like mine?” Yasmine was positively aghast at the idea— _she_ certainly didn’t want to go back to having a fishtail with no penetrable orifices.

“Nah,” said Alex with a shrug. “I don’t want to make the other mer-girls too jealous. I’ll leave that to you guys: the future Mr. and Mrs. King-and-Queen-of-the-Mermaids.”

“But are you sure?” asked Josh. “If you go through with this, there’s no telling how long it could be before you—” he blushed and cleared his throat, “—have a pussy again.”

Alex giggled at that and then shrugged again. “What can I say? I like having these big old knockers just fine,” she said, cupping her hands underneath her ample breasts, “but for whatever reason, I think I’m just more comfortable with fish-business than I ever was with a dick _or_ a pussy.”

“You do you, I guess,” said Josh. Then he pointed at one of the potion-bottles and asked, “Is that one mine?”

“Yep,” said Alex.

Without a word, he picked up the bottle and pulled out the cork.

“Wait; already!?” said Yasmine. “Why not wait until it’s time for us to leave!?”

Josh sighed. “I could. But… I figure that if a merman is what I’m going to be for the foreseeable future, I’d rather just rip that band-aid off right now and start getting used to it again. You know—give myself a little time to process everything before we get back to the island.”

Alex put her hands down on the desk and jumped up out of the chair. “All right,” she said. “Just give me a minute to run downstairs and close up the shop. Then we’ll drink a toast to getting our tails back.”

Josh was surprised. “You too?”

“Why not?” said Alex as she headed toward the study door. “Misery loves company. And it feels like it’d be kind of a dick move if I just let you be the only one here who had to crawl around on the floor with no legs.”

* * *

Alex was true to her word. She closed up the curio shop, and then she came right back upstairs and drank her potion at the same time Josh drank his. More or less at the same time, they both doubled over from terrible stomach-cramps and then fell to the floor of the study as their legs went weak from unbearable pain. Their bones and flesh took on the consistency of soft clay, rearranging themselves, molding themselves, leg-bones morphing into the vertebrae of fishtails, feet flattening out and shifting into tailfins. Alex and Josh both discovered to their dismay that as their fins formed and their shoes and socks fell away, their shorts and underwear were simultaneously torn to shreds when their legs zippered together into singular columns of scale-covered muscle.

In short order, the transformation was done, and the pain receded. Josh and Alex, both breathing heavily, sat up—using their arms to prop up their torsos, since they couldn’t actually bend at the waist any longer—with their newly-reformed caudal fins beating a steady tattoo on the wooden floor. Alex had her same old red-orange scales and translucent yellow fin back; whereas Josh now sported a shark-tail much like Yasmine’s (with the tailfin sideways and symmetrical, like a dolphin’s or a whale’s, rather than vertical like a real shark’s), except that it was blue instead of pink.

Alex reached over and felt the shark-skin of Josh’s new tail. “This is a good look for you, cuz,” she said. “I approve.”

“I’m so glad,” said Josh with a roll of his eyes.

“I think it’s very fetching,” said Yasmine, who now slid out of her bath-chair and down onto the floor. Without his legs, Josh couldn’t push it around anymore, so she no longer saw a point to sitting in it. She leered at her fiancé lasciviously and said, “Would you like to join me in the bedroom and show me how it works?”

Josh turned to Alex and said, “Don’t wait up for us!” Then, without another word, he followed Yasmine as she pulled herself out of the study with her arms, dragging her sexy pink tail behind her.

“I won’t!” Alex shouted after them as they left. Then, once Josh’s tailfin had disappeared out into the living room and she found herself alone, she lay back on the floor, folded her arms underneath her prodigious bosom (although her shorts and panties had been torn away by the transformation, her t-shirt remained, stretched tight across her chest), and came to an annoying realization. “Damn it,” she said aloud. “I should’ve masturbated one last time before drinking that magic-juice.”

* * *

Uncle Jack didn’t show up again for the rest of that night, or at all the next day. Josh started to wonder whether he hadn’t jumped the gun by drinking his potion too early, given that he had no way to reverse its effects without his uncle’s magic.  
  
Alex didn’t seem to mind being a mermaid again; she appeared to be perfectly content crawling all over the place on her tail. Stairs presented the only real difficulty, but on the rare occasion that she did need to scoot herself down to the shop for one reason or another, climbing her way back up to the condo was merely a matter of pulling with her arms, bracing with her tailfin, and flopping her way up one step at a time. Piece of cake.

(Well; there were also bathroom visits to consider, but it would be best to leave that part unmentioned.)  
  
So the three merpeople made it through the day, moving between the rooms of the condo as best as they were able. They mostly spent their time considering what things they wanted to pack and bring with them now that they all had some ample warning this time.  
  
That evening, Josh and Yasmine once again made love to each other in the guest room that they shared; and in the privacy of her own bedroom, Alex used what means were available to her—namely, her boobs and her own two hands—to tease and play with herself until she was quaking with unslaked lust and futilely fingering at her gaping little egg-hole in horny frustration. On this particular occasion, she didn’t manage to get herself off—her nipples became too sore and overstimulated before she could get all the way there—but she enjoyed herself just the same; and she knew full well that she’d have a much easier time of it once she had Sally back in her arms.

* * *

The next morning involved some waiting, some relying on Yasmine’s bath-chair to reach any low shelves or counter-tops while the three merpeople made breakfast, and then a great deal more waiting—until, at last, the early afternoon arrived, and they all more felt than heard an enormous **_thump_** rock the building from above.  
  
Yasmine was the first to flop her way up to the roof to investigate. There, she found Uncle Jack wearing a stereotypical WWII-era flying ace costume—a bomber jacket, a leather cap with a strap, and goggles—and a dirigible that looked to be over a hundred years old if it was a day, anchored by a mooring-rope to the building’s rooftop.  
  
Once Josh and Alex had finally managed to crawl up the access-stairs after Yasmine and make their way across the hot concrete roof—by no means a pleasant thing to feel on skin _or_ scales—and board the small airship, Uncle Jack patted the hull from outside and said, “Don’t worry about steering, kids. This thing’s charmed to take you right where you want to go.” If he had been surprised to see Josh and Alex already polymorphed back into merfolk, he didn’t show or mention it.  
  
“You aren’t coming with us?” asked Alex.  
  
“Nah. The whole point of heading into the Triangle is to lose a ship with all hands. If I go with you, I’d get lost too; and then where would I be? But this old girl,” he rapped on the hull again, “she’s had a good run. Now, she’s the _S.S. Expendable_.”  
  
Uncle Jack hugged Alex goodbye, and then he did the same to Josh. He gave a friendly nod to Yasmine, who answered with a heartfelt, “Thank you, Uncle Jack, for all you’ve done!” Finally, Jack set a heavy suitcase, laden full with useful items meant for making life on the island easier, down onto the flight-deck of the dirigible’s small cab.

After that, the wizard said nothing more, except to utter a magic word as he cast off the mooring-line and set the airship free. As the vessel drifted away and climbed high up into the sky, Uncle Jack waved a handkerchief over his head, a token gesture of farewell—but the three merpeople inside the craft couldn’t see him, thanks to the tall gunwales that ran all the way around its wooden hull.

Precisely as Jack had promised, they had no need to steer the enchanted ship. Yasmine merely reclined on the deck, lying in between Josh and Alex, and the three merpeople allowed themselves to be carried off to the Bermuda Triangle in quiet, companionable anticipation.

They were going home.

* * *

As the Barrier around Mermaid Island had fallen and faded away, so too had the differences in the two dimensions’ geographies and time-streams. Now time was passing on Mermaid Island at the same rate as everywhere else on Earth. The other mermaids already knew this to be true, because at night, when they looked up at the sky, they saw familiar stars and constellations and the occasional planet that they recognized and remembered well from their former human lives, consistently from night to night.

Josh had been back on the island for another month now, living his life as a shark-tailed merman—still the only merman, and the official King of the Mermaids. Yasmine and Alex were both concurrently accorded the title of Queen, and alone among all the mermaids, only Yasmine was acknowledged as Josh’s wife. That said, none of the other mermaids _ever_ deigned to refer to Josh as Yasmine’s husband—he got the sense that he was regarded as a piece of communal property on the island. As expected, the other mermaids had been positively _thrilled_ by the sight of his claspers—indeed, the mermaids _worshiped_ them, enthusiastically, with their mouths or hands or breasts, whenever Yasmine saw fit to allow it.  
  
Life was good—swimming in the sea, basking in the lagoon, lazing on the beaches. Making love in the waves to Yasmine or to any other mermaid who fancied a frolic with a merman at the moment.  
  
When Josh, Yasmine, and Alex had first left—disappeared into nothingness from the perspective of the mermaids, and entirely without explanation—everyone had simply assumed that they had all three swum off together to explore the oceans or seek new and distant shores. After all, plenty of other mermaids has done exactly that (and some of them were making waves in the worldwide media for their troubles).  
  
It wouldn’t be very long at all now before knowledge of the existence of mermaids was common, widespread, and accepted. One day soon, perhaps even Mermaid Island itself would be discovered by the wider world.  
  
In the meantime, there were still at least twenty other mermaids in total living on the island, not counting Josh and Yaz and Alex. After those three had disappeared, the remaining girls had waited for a month and then gone out into the middle waters near the island, searching for viable, fertilized eggs.  
  
They had found six. They had brought these few, precious eggs back to the lagoon to be watched over and protected.  
  
Whenever Josh and Yasmine looked at the helpless little clutch, they both got a particular feeling about just one of the eggs. That one, Josh decided, was definitely Yasmine’s child.  
  
Another one seemed to hold a similar fascination for Alex.  
  
Even more intriguing, for reasons that Josh couldn’t quite explain, he was pretty sure that only three of the eggs were going to hatch into females; the other three would be males. Somehow, he just knew that he was going to have three daughters and three sons.  
  
Like the Brady Bunch. But with fins.  
  
And then, one day, at the end of their lengthy gestation, the eggs began to hatch…

* * *

**_FIN_ **

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There you have it. Mermaid porn. Maybe it's not exactly PWP as advertised, but it _is_ , I think, the bare minimum amount of plot that I can manage when writing about mermaid sex. Mermaids are awesome, no matter whether they're depicted as mammals or egg-layers (and I'm sure I'll wind up writing plenty of stories in the future featuring both varieties). Until my next tail-tale, TTFN!


End file.
